#128 Bernardo Kastrup - Materialism is Complete Nonsense

25:08It helps us to imagine the universe as a stack of 17 spatially unbound quantum fields, some of which interact with others, some of which hardly interact with anything else. It helps us think of things this way. It doesn't mean that there is a thing out there called a quantum field. No, the world behaves as though there were 17 quantum fields. Eventually, we will succeed in some grand unification theory, and there will be one quantum field. And even gravity will be folded into that with some arcane mathematics and acrobatics. We will get to that. And even then, that will just be the new convenient fiction.

25:51So science is not in the business of telling us what the world is. This is quite a fundamental misunderstanding of what the scientific method is all about. Science is in the business of telling us what we will see next. And in the process of doing that, it helps to come up with a convenient fiction in terms of which we can think of a model that accounts for what we will see next. Mm-hmm. I mean, people will want to say, okay, I get what you're saying. Like, science realistically only tells you what things do. And fundamentally, yeah, if you ask me to describe what a quantum field is or what an electron is or something, I'll sort of tell you what it does.

26:37But like, that's all there is because, you know, I look in a microscope and I can observe an atom. I can look around me and I can observe a physical world. People sort of imagine that we're these sort of conscious agents who sit inside of our own heads. And we've got these little like windows, you know, our eyes and our ears and little sort of sense perception all over our skin. And what we're essentially doing is just sort of like letting in information, right? And because, you know, if the world is mental, you know, I can't control the world around me like I can control my own thoughts. I can think happy things and sad things.

27:13But the world outside of me, it impresses itself upon me. Right. And when it does. It feels like I'm sort of accepting some input data. So aren't we just kind of, you know, astronauts of the material world just sort of flying through and having access to the things around us?

27:33Bernardo Kastrup:accurately represented to our minds? Well, clearly the world impinges itself on us. That's the experience we call life and being in the world. But the idea that what is out there consists only of how it appears to us can be immediately contradicted by an element of the world that we are very acquainted with, and that's ourselves. imagine if an alien came here and looked at you dressed in your black t-shirt with this microphone in front of you nodding as you're nodding right now or gesticulating with your hands and the alien would say that's all there is to Alex Alex is just the set of images that I perceive there is nothing more to the reality of Alex than how Alex appears to me the gesticulation and the nodding and the movements and the words that come out of Alex's mouth and so on and so forth.

28:38Well, you would know that if you know anything ever, you would know this, that the alien's assertion is untrue because behind underlying and somehow imminent in what the alien sees, there is the inner life of Alex, which is the real Alex. It's the numinal Alex as opposed to the phenomenal Alex. It's the thing in itself as opposed to how it appears to external observation. And that is very, very, very important for Alex, that Alex is not just a set of external appearances, that there is an inner life, there is an inner reality, a noumenal reality to Alex. Now, take the next step. What is the appearance of Alex?

29:25You know Alex has a noumenal reality, but clearly Alex also has a phenomenal reality. You look in the mirror and you see it. What is that reality? Well, it's made of the same kinds of atoms and fields that constitute the rest of the universe. So at least in Alex's case, atoms and fields, all the physical stuff, is what Alex's numinal world, Alex's inner life, looks like when Alex is observed from the outside. At least in that one case, matter is the extrinsic appearance of inner mentation, inner mental states. That's why there is this correlation between inner experience and brain states, right?

30:10And one is the appearance of the other. Of course, they correlate. So unless you're prepared to postulate some gratuitous, completely arbitrary, discontinuating nature, we have then to at least be open to the possibility that not only in Alex's case, but in the rest of all other cases in this universe, matter too is the extrinsic appearance of some form of qualitative inner reality. That is the only reasonable null hypothesis here. In other words, you need argument to defend some other hypothesis. Because the face value situation is that my body is made of the same atoms and force fields as the rest of the universe.

30:59Clearly, my body is how my mental inner life appears to outside observation. So the same should hold about the rest of the universe. That doesn't mean that I'm saying everything is conscious. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that all matter is the extrinsic appearance of inner mental state. Got a Sam's Cafe pizza order up. You know the best part about this spicy Italian sausage? I voted for this topping. Yeah, just another perk of being a member. Come join us. Sam's Club.

31:34Bernardo Kastrup:Okay, so we'll slow down a little bit here. We'll try and sort of pull this apart just to make sure everybody's following along. there is a sort of sense in which there is a me right like this is why people have been motivated to come up with like mind body dualism and things like this and and sort of debate it till the cow come home because it feels like there is this thing called me which is not quite the same thing as like you know my my hands or physical matter and the clothes that i'm wearing and stuff there's like this me somewhere but just for the materialist as well like there is some sense in which i just am this collection of atoms you know i just am the collection of atoms that's in my brain and my body and it sounds like you want to say that's kind of true but in the opposite direction where like the materialist says you have a bunch of matter and that just somehow is the same thing as this conscious experience if i'm hearing you correctly you're saying you are just this conscious experience you are just this like mentality it's just that if you look at that from the outside, it just looks like a brain.

32:40It just looks like a person. And so it's not that you have this brain activity and it's mysteriously correlated with experience. Why is this neuron firing correlated with the experience of red? You're also not saying that, well, the brain activity just like is the experience of red. It's that the brain activity is what the experience of red looks like from the outside. From the inside, it looks like red. But from the outside, it looks like a neuron firing, something like that? Yes, exactly right. There is only ever an inner experience, except that I can have an inner experience that correlates with your inner experience.

33:18And to me, your inner experience appears as the body of Alex, with arms, legs, mouth, nose, and the movements of Alex's body. So there are only ever mental states. This is the most parsimonious hypothesis, metaphysical hypothesis there can be. Of course, we have been culturally indoctrinated into attributing intuitiveness to the notion that there is this fundamental separation between mental states and physical states, even though all we can ever know by direct acquaintance when it comes to physical states are the qualities of physical states as they appear on the screen of perception, this stuff you see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and so forth.

34:04I am not a dualist. I think dualism has some fundamental problems, like the interaction problem. If matter and mind are fundamentally different, then it shouldn't be possible for them to interact because they pertain to two completely disjoint ontological domains. And dualism says that they are fundamentally different, but they do interact. I see that as a contradiction. And even if it is, in principle, tenable, I think dualism is unnecessary. It's not parsimonious. It's inflationary. We don't need another kind of state beyond mental state to make sense of the world. We just have to understand that there are mental states I have direct access to.

34:48Those are my own. And mental states I only have indirect access to mediated by the screen of perception. But the contents of my screen of perception are also mental states that represent other mental states out there to which I have no direct access. This is enough, so I wouldn't go down the avenue of dualism. It may be a more intuitive step because of our religious history and so forth, but I don't think it's ultimately helpful. I think we should bite the bullet and sort of get our thinking going in a coherent line as opposed to sort of conceding too much.

35:26Bernardo Kastrup:well you know descartes when he sort of proposes his famous formulation of mind body dualism the idea that these are like separate substances is motivated by the thought that these seem in principle to be separable like i can imagine myself existing without my body i can just kind of imagine being like this sort of abstractly existing consciousness personhood somewhere in the ether with no hands, no brain, no anything. I can imagine that. I can also obviously imagine like a body that's not conscious, like a corpse or something. So at least conceptually, these two things seem to be distinct. And if they're distinct concepts, that gives us some good reason to think that they are like distinct things, even if they happen to sort of overlap in a really serious way.

36:12So I've got to say, like, that makes sense to me as a thought, right? I feel like I can imagine myself without a brain. And I'm a little bit confused as to whether you would be able to

36:23Bernardo Kastrup:imagine yourself without a brain. So I just wonder what you thought about that. Totally. I can imagine that. So it is conceivable, but conceivability is not sufficient to pronounce something as a viable or plausible hypothesis. Look, I will acknowledge this. there is a lazy, not rigorous, incoherent line of thought according to which separation between mind and matter makes sense. I acknowledge that. But that's not what you're talking about. We are talking about disciplined reasoning, guided by logic and empirical evidence. We can do better than just go with whatever sounds more intuitive to our culturally indoctrinated mindsets, right?

37:11We can do better than that. That's what philosophy is all about. I think the reason that I ask that is because, I mean, you say that, you know, a person or at least a brain,

37:21Bernardo Kastrup:I'm not entirely clear on this, is what like, you know, a mental state looks like from the outside. And what I'm saying is if you can imagine you existing without a brain, like in that, I'm not saying that's actually how the world really is, but just step into that possible world for a moment where you exist, but you have no brain or physical body of any kind. What does that look like in that possible world? You know, somebody who looks at you without the brain, if in the real world, the brain is just what you look like. That's why I was confused as to whether you would be able to imagine such a thing, because maybe you think that you just are what a sort of brain presents itself to other people.

38:00Not only can we imagine it, we can actually experience something very close to it. If you put yourself in the best sensory deprivation tank you can buy, flotation tank, and you go into it and it's almost perfectly dark, almost perfectly silent, and you're floating in high salinity water, so you don't have the sense of touch either or weight. You don't have any sense of texture. There is no smell. There is no flavor. You are essentially just your endogenous inner life. There is no perceptual stimulus triggering anything in the screen of perception. So there is no matter in that state. There is only thought, emotion, imagination, fantasy, intuition, reasoning, abstraction.

38:52But there is no extension. There is no salty or sweet. There is no weight. There is no texture. There is no color. There's no melody. None of that. So that is what you're asking for. You imagine yourself in a world that is devoid of perception. Is there anything left? Of course, it's your entire inner life. It's the things that matter most to you. Your memories, your thoughts, your opinions, your views, your imagination, your dreams, your fears. All of that is still there. Now, if somebody else were to enter that sensory deprivation chamber with a night vision scope, that inner life of yours would appear to that person as a humanoid body floating in salt water.

39:48so this is the most parsimonious and it's eminently coherent hypothesis about what's going on there are only mental states and of course there are boundaries how those mental states sort of cohere together to form mental complexes this coherence of certain mental states together to form complexes define boundaries what is outside and inside that mental complex Now, my body seems to form the boundaries of a mental complex I call Bernardo Castro. Because if you stick a needle in my arm, I feel it. But if you stick a needle in the arm of my chair, I don't feel it. It's beyond that boundary. The mechanisms for boundary formation, we have a very good theory.

40:35It's a good starting point for it. And that's integrated information theory. It tells us how mental states will sort of link together to maximize integrated information. And if you keep on linking more and more and more, actually you maximize information integration by shedding off parts of your empire. When the empire grows too big, when the mental complex grows too big, it forms fault lines. You integrate more information by separating stuff from you. That stuff becomes the external world, which is not part of your complex, but impinges on your complex and therefore appears to you as what we call matter or physicality.

41:16There is a very, very parsimonious, empirically consistent thought line that leads to this. Now, the argument against it, well, but it's not intuitive to me. Well, yeah, okay, sorry. Sorry then. Because, you know, philosophy is about thinking right, not thinking in a culture-bound manner. We know today, we think very arrogantly about our ancestors as having been deluded about a great many things. Let me give you an example. Hundreds of years ago, there was this theory called effluvium. Effluvium was supposed to be an elastic, invisible, completely transparent fluid that would connect, say, an amber bar to wheat chaff.

42:01and shaft would be attracted to the amber bar because effluvium, that elastic invisible substance, would pull the shaft to the amber bar. So that was an explanation for electromagnetic attraction. Of course, it couldn't explain electromagnetic repulsion, but this was a very, very serious idea, completely coherent with the empirical evidence that amber rods attract shafts. But that doesn't mean that because it was intuitive to the people then that it is the best convenient fiction to adopt and let alone the best metaphysics to adopt.

42:48Bernardo Kastrup:Yeah, I think it's also worth pointing out that basically every view that somebody can encounter to explain consciousness will have some kind of unintuitive element to it. Like when I speak to materialist physicalists about consciousness views like panpsychism or idealism of any kind, they say, you know, I just, I just sort of can't imagine that like an electron is like a mental state or has consciousness or something. And I'm like, yeah, but you know how difficult it is also to imagine that you've got a bunch of inert dead matter. And if you just like arrange it in the right way, you just like get you know the taste of coca-cola just by like putting like bricks together it just it's like that's also extremely unintuitive we've just kind of forgotten how unintuitive it is because we've just swallowed it wholesale right so so i think it's it's fair to say that intuition is is uh at best a limited guide here um but there are some questions which loom right I find it really interesting, the idea that what we experience as the physical world is just how mentality appears from the outside.

43:58But there is this strange problem of personhood. There's me and there's you. And not only that, but it's not like I'm looking at this singular point. if you appeared to me as like a point in space or even like a little orb or something but okay maybe that's just what bernardo castrop looks like from the outside but i can kind of look at my own hands and there's a sense in which they're a part of me but a sense in which they're kind of not like i feel like i could cut off my hand and yeah i'd feel it and it would like hurt so it's kind of part of me in that respect but it's not a part of me and that if you cut it off and got rid of it i'd feel like you know there's there's less alex o 'connor there's less of you know my physical body but there's not less of me in a way that i feel like if you you know lobotomized half of my brain there'd probably be less of like my personality it seems like that's kind of important to my person it gets a little bit confusing like where to sort of draw this boundary in the same way like how we you know you could say well because you can feel it it's in some sense a part of you but like i can feel my skin right but of course over time my skin sheds you know it becomes the dust in the air and if all of it's just kind of made up of mentality like whose mentality is that like is it a part of me is it not a part of me and when it disappears like how many of me are there and am i all across the universe you know what i mean like how do we begin sort of like approaching this question on your yeah i think you you you're on to something that is important um i can even make it worse.

45:31We don't feel our appendix unless it's infected, right? What about your kidneys? Is there something it is like to be your kidneys? What about your liver, your left big toe? You can wiggle it, but most of the times you're not conscious of your left big toe from the inside, right? Look, to say that everything is made of mental states is the beginning of the journey. The next step in the journey is to figure out how those mental states arrange themselves in different mental complexes. You can think of a complex as a graph. You know graph theory in math where you have these vertices that are connected by edges depending on how information flows or how causality flows between them.

46:18You can create a graph of mental states that are sort of in a causal network. They influence one another causally. They can influence each other's state. A graph of mental states with a causal structure is what we call a mental complex. Now, this word complex has been in psychology since the 19th century. All this stuff about graph and information theory, that's the new stuff that IIT has brought into it. But it's new instrumentation of a very old, well-understood notion, mental complexes. Now, the boundaries of this complex are the boundaries of a sort of innate sense of identity. Because there is something it is like to be a complex, but there isn't anything it is like to be individual mental states in that complex.

47:12For instance, I have a holistic experience of the monitor in front of me, of the feeling of my skin touching the chair that is supporting me, the colors I see in front of me. the smell in the air, the texture of my clothes. All of that is part of one complex. There is nothing it is like for Bernardo to feel the texture of my clothes and not be seen in you right now. These states subsume together into an integrated state. This is all integrated information theory. The temptation is to say that, therefore, Bernardo and Alex are only one complex. But there is no necessity here. Bernardo and Alex are sets of complexes.

48:02The complex that I identify with myself is the ego complex. But there are obviously many other complexes in this great web that appears to the outside as my body. So for you, there are the memories we are not evoking, the feelings we repress, the traumas we forgot, the wishes we deny. All this stuff that psychology in the 19th century would call the unconscious. It is not unconscious. It's unconscious from the perspective of the ego because it's a different complex. The ego has no direct access to the other complexes that are going on within the great collective that each one of us is. But each of those other complexes are conscious from their own perspective.

48:54There is something it is like to be them. So think of us as sort of the passengers in a bus. And the ego complex is the driver, the executive ego. It controls the body, makes choices. But there is a lot more going on in our inner mental lives. some of which sometimes appear in dreams, in your roses, when you're depressed, or in phases of great upheaval, when we realize, oh my God, I have been feeling like this forever, I just didn't know, right? So your left big toe, your liver, your kidneys, they are the extrinsic appearances of other complexes that your ego cannot directly access. so they do appear to the ego as matter or sometimes you can directly access them because you've touched your left big big toe but there is this gray area in which information integration is not complete as in a single right so like from the outside it looks like a big toe from the inside it feels like a big toe right and like i can i can make sense of that you you've used the word

50:07Bernardo Kastrup:ego a few times there and i want to guess that the way you're using the word ego is how religious traditions and um philosophers of all kinds might use the word like self which is not the same thing as consciousness right like there's this sort of distinction between consciousness which is just awareness of any kind and then there's this thing called the self or the ego which is this like unity of conscious experience into like an I and a me, right? And a lot of religious traditions have taken this kind of realization that everything is made out of the same stuff, that we're all part of one big kind of mental field, and it's just like localizations, ripples in the waves, as it were, and that's all we are, but there's just one big ocean.

50:54To say that, realistically, this idea of the individuated self is an illusion, doesn't exist, or that there's only one self and we're kind of all participating in it.

51:04Bernardo Kastrup:I don't know if you use the word ego in the same way that they're speaking about self, but what do you think about that? And do you believe in Bernardo Kastrup? Do you think that you exist? You know what I mean? No, no, no, I don't. I don't believe in a permanent personal self. I think the evidence is overwhelming that it's not there. What we call a personal self is a narrative. It's an inner story that we mistakenly identify with. It's that person who was born that day and is married to that other person and does this or that for a living in this address. That's the narrative self. What we call the personal self is a narrative, the narrative self.

51:46Some psychologists would call it the adaptive self. It's a story in terms of which we can act in the world and defend ourselves psychologically. And a whole field of psychology called ego defense mechanisms. It's how you defend against the assault of the monstrous world around us. How do you defend your personal agency and even your personal value? So the meaning that we attribute to this persistent personal self is not there at all. It's a narrative that keeps changing. So I don't buy into that. But I will buy into what Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, called the self with capital S. Because there is something that is obviously there.

52:39It obviously exists. It's the only thing that obviously exists. And that is subjectivity. Subjectivity. Philosopher Ite Shani called it core subjectivity, which is what's left when you get rid of all the narratives about what we are. It is that to which experience is given, that which receives experience as the subject of experience. Galen Strawson wrote once that not even a sensible Buddhist would deny that there is the subject and that experience entails a subject. Now, we mistake what that subject is. Is it personal? Is it permanent? I think the answer to both questions is no. But that we mistake the characteristics we attribute to the subject doesn't mean that the subject itself is not there.

53:38It obviously is. It is the thing that is theorizing about what the subject is. It is the dative of experience, that to which experience is given. So that self obviously exists. I would go as far as to say that the most parsimonious metaphysical hypothesis that is still coherent and empirically consistent today is that this core subject, this dative of experience, is the only thing that exists. And the myriad of different qualities of experience are just different patterns of excitation of the self. You can imagine this self with big S as the ultimate quantum field, the unified field. It's that which spans the entirety of nature and the apparent diversity of natural states are different patterns of excitation of this one self.

54:35Just like one guitar string can produce many notes, depending on how it's excited, this one field of subjectivity that nature is can get excited in many different ways. producing discombobulatingly various patterns, practically infinite ones, and yet it's only one thing. This is the ultimate reductive metaphysics. I am a reductionist, by the way, and I'm an unashamed extreme reductionist. I think everything, literally everything, can be reduced to one thing, and that is the non-personal self.

55:14Bernardo Kastrup:so i want to ask you a question that i asked philip goff just last week um which is like why are you not a hindu you know like these these guys have been saying for thousands of years that there's this one great big self called the the atman and in many you know hindu traditions atman is the same thing as brahman which is like you know the ultimate reality and that's kind of all there is and all that exists and we all kind of participate in it like is there is there sort of something in that view that's attractive to you? Have you ever tried being a Hindu for a bit? I just wonder hearing you talk like that, you know, it feels like I'm sort of reading the Upanishads or something.

55:52Well, I don't know how much baggage would come with the notion that I would try to be a Hindu. I mean, I think what I just told you is, frankly, the only plausible metaphysical hypothesis, but there is more to being a Hindu than arriving at this conclusion I just shared with you. And I don't want to commit to all the rest because I don't know what all the rest is. Yeah. So, okay. So we've got this sort of, you know, great big, great big self. And I really like how you talk about, you know, the ripples in the wave, right? It's a very helpful way of thinking about it. Interestingly, I was just, just the other day, I was having dinner

56:29Bernardo Kastrup:with two people I just met. One of them is a psychiatrist, like studying psychiatry. One of them's a physicist and i was talking to the psychiatrist about consciousness and about you know panpsychism and idealism and stuff and i can't remember exactly what i was saying but i was saying something a little bit about how consciousness is sort of like localized like activity of one big thing and the physicist she sort of cropped up and said yeah that's really interesting that's that's a bit like how we physicists think of like electrons you know like in the sort of in the quantum wave field. And I was like, well, well, isn't isn't that interesting?

57:06Isn't isn't that interesting how you think about it in the in the same way as how we're talking about consciousness? And it was quite a funny moment because, yeah, there's a lot of sense to be made about this. And you're imagining this sort of great big wave, this great big ocean, and there are ripples in the wave. And you've spoken about how like a whirlpool or a ripple in a wave is not a thing. You can't like pick it up and take it out of the water. It is just the water it's still localized you can you can like point at it but it's like an excitation of this of this ocean but it's it's nothing new it's nothing separate from the ocean but the thing is like yeah like a wave is like the same thing as the water it's made out of the water but there's like some kind of reason why it forms a wave you know oceans don't just like

57:51Bernardo Kastrup:spontaneously start moving around you know those gravitational factors earthquakes wind whatever right if all that exists is just this self right i can imagine that if we just all experienced reality all at once all is one big thing and i was experiencing the andromeda galaxy and your thoughts and my thoughts and somebody else's thoughts all at the same time then cool but we've got this individualized individualization right and even if we describe it as well okay it's kind of a bit of an illusion it's all just like excitations of one big field why like why is there not just one big unit of experience why do we get this sort of localizing and excitement why do we get electrons cropping up of the quantum field theory why don't we just have one big field you know i sense two questions here one is how can the field be self-excitable without an external agency that causes an excitation well this is no different for any for any metaphysics you get because science has the very same problem and the way we solved it in physics is to say the quantum fields fluctuate they have these spontaneous fluctuations they are self-excited that's why there is a universe.

59:06That's how the whole thing started. There's nothing outside nature, and yet here is nature doing a great many things, right? So it can only be through self-excitation. So that question is always there, regardless of your metaphysics. It cannot be used to differentiate one metaphysics from the other as one being more plausible or not. Self-excitation is inevitable, not only for all metaphysics, but for science as well, ultimately. Why there was a Big Bang. something had to fluctuate the big bang was a very big quantum fluctuation but quantum fluctuations are happening all the time around us this is an empirical fact by the way in the vacuum virtual particles pop in and out of existence all the time because of this quantum foam that is always active at the base of the universe now just to be clear i just to interrupt

59:55Bernardo Kastrup:briefly when you say that virtual particles pop in and out of existence to help people along here are you imagining whereas in my head you know traditionally i think of this big black space and it's like bang there it is and whoosh there it's gone you would probably rather picture this as like a kind of still body of water where there's a little ripple and then the ripple goes away something like that correct because if you don't imagine things that's why a field quantum theory requires fields because if you don't postulate that particles are not things particles are just behaviors of the field.

1:00:32They are something the field does and then stops doing. If you don't understand things this way, then you end up having to believe that stuff pops in and out of existence for no reason. I mean, if anything is magical thinking, then this is it, right? Nothing is more magical thinking than that. That's why we say, well, there are no particles. We say particles as a metaphor. And because of historical reasons, there are only ripples on the lake. There is only ever the lake. The ripples are something the lake does, and it may stop doing. So nothing magically popped in and out of existence. It's just that nature was doing one thing, and it stopped doing it.

1:01:11That's quantum fluctuations. So that was the first part of your question. Can this feud of subjectivity be self-excited? Well, obviously it is. Regardless of your metaphysics, whatever is out there is self-excited, because there is nothing outside nature by the very definition of nature. The other question... It was about why there is a me separate from you. Why is Bernardo capable of accessing his own inner life, but not Alex's inner life and the other way around, presumably? Well, that's just evolution. Look, IIT gives us the beginning of a theory of how mental states join together to form complexes or split apart because splitting apart the formation of fault lines leads to more integrated information.

1:02:02It's the best theory. It's a starting point, but it's the best starting point we have. given enough time on the surface of this planet mental states were bound to join together in complexes that found a way to maintain themselves now why was that well because once there was a complex that could maintain itself that's the one that survived and the ones that couldn't maintain themselves are gone and eventually one popped out that could spin out other complexes reproduction i can see that and here we are i kind of i kind of want to go a step back though because like i'm interested in this question of the excitation of the field in terms of just like say a a particle right just this one little vibration just this one excitation there's this

1:02:58Bernardo Kastrup:question of like you know can something be self-exciting you know maybe there's this ocean that can produce its own waves but there's this question of like why like and it's i understand if you want to say something like look we don't really know but that's not a problem for like my metaphysics that's just a problem for metaphysics in general right and that's fine but i just wonder if you have an idea why because if i accept your view that there is just this one big mind i would expect i think you know it's hard to imagine what i would expect if i was not a unified you know agent but i think i would expect that there would just be sort of one big ball of experience right but for some reason it just like you know is it like that it wants to can you even speak of desires like in in this sense i'm trying to think of like how to picture what's actually happening there in like your language as it were i i i get where you're going with it so So I will make a concession, but first I'll give a few disclaimers if you're okay with it.

1:04:00I'm a naturalist. I think nature does what it does because it is what it is. And nature has its archetypal templates of behavior. And nature's unfolding is the natural unfolding of these archetypal templates of behavior. nature does what it does because it is what it is that so a naturalist there is no external intervention into nature from some kind of individual individuated force standing outside nature that wouldn't be naturalism so i i'm a committed naturalist um i also guard against anthropomorphizing things because one thing i have seen a lot amongst people who sympathize with analytic idealism and idealism in general is the temptation to say, well, if the entire universe is made of mental states just like I am, then it should behave and think and desire like I do.

1:04:59No, our complexities evolved on the surface of a rock over 4 billion years because of a scarcity of resources. The other mental states out there didn't undergo that process, So there is no reason to think that they would be even remotely akin to ours. The only similarity would be that whatever their inner life is, it's also qualitative, but it may not have anything else related to how we feel from within. So having made these two disclaimers, I will concede this. With just about any other metaphysics, certainly with physicalism, which is a metaphysics, you cannot speak of why. There is no why.

1:05:46There is just the mechanical unfolding of nature's intrinsic regularities. And you can add a little bit of chance as the source of auto-excitation to kickstart the process. but under idealism if it is all one great field of subjectivity then yes, strictly speaking we can talk of a why we can talk of a felt impetus to action and we can, with a lot of caution imagine what that felt impetus might have been like exploring the notion that impetus was felt in the mind, and I am also a mind. And although these are completely incommensurable minds, there is a point of singularity. There is a point in which these two things are one and the same field of subjectivity.

1:06:43So with all these disclaimers that I just made and highlighting that what I'm about to say is speculation and that even if it is completely wrong, it does not in any way affect the plausibility of analytic idealism. Analytic idealism does not depend at all on what I'm about to say. And it is a slight form of anthropomorphization, but I will entertain it. What could have been the impetus to action that kick-started all this? The only thing I can imagine... Well, there are two things I can imagine. One is an irresistible desire to self-knowledge. What is it that is going on? What is it that I am?

1:07:35Not articulated in this way, because I articulated it in a self-reflective way, and self-reflection is the result of four billion years of painful blood evolution on this rock. So the mind of nature in its primordial state is not going to self-reflect. Otherwise, flies and amoeba would self-reflect, and we have no empirical reason to think that they do, right? So I am saying this out of my own self-reflection, but one could imagine that there is an instinctive, felt, not articulated, but felt impetus to self-knowledge. That's one possibility. Another possibility is sheer solitude. how mind-breaking sheer solitude could be.

1:08:20But again, this is poetic imagination. I am sort of going off to the races with poetic imagination. This is no longer analytic philosophy.

1:08:31Bernardo Kastrup:Of course. But of course, the other question that it sort of raises is, okay so you're telling me that we all kind of exist as the result of a kind of mental activity of this great big ultimate mind which is the ground of all being and of all consciousness and in whom we sort of get our existence and it starts to sound a little bit pantheistic it starts to sound a little bit like you're describing something like the mind of god right like when where people say the world is created by an intelligent sort of like a creative intelligence right which in some sense is like kind of non-physical but produces the physical world it's all a bit of a mystery so like oh okay well we've now been led to this idea that the universe crops up as the result of one big mind and do you think that it is fair to characterize that as verging on a religious position

1:09:32yes i would be dishonest if i if i didn't say yes to this um only some form of extreme prejudice would have to stop one from acknowledging this um but um look i i don't know what people mean when they say god i think there are eight billion definitions of god out there right one for each person. So if I say, well, I acknowledge God, I don't know what I'm acknowledging in the minds of the people who are listening to you. I'll tell you this. I don't think the God that I would imagine under analytic idealism, I don't think it is deliberate. I don't think it had a plan. I don't think it's passing moral judgment.

1:10:20I don't think it is self-reflecting. I think it is doing what it is doing fairly spontaneously. It's simply unfolding its own mental archetypes in a spontaneous... I'm tempted to use the word automatic, but that goes too far. In a regular, predictable, spontaneous manner. Yes, it is mental stuff. Yes, it is omniscient by definition. It's the sum total of nature and its mental states. So it is seant. Therefore, it is omniscient. It is omnipresent because it's all there is. And it's omnipotent in the sense that everything that happens, happens by virtue of its unfolding, its doing, its behavior.

1:11:06So you could say the universe is God dancing. And you could even say... I lost my train of thought. So I'll give you that. It comes close to religious traditions, and I would be dishonest if I wouldn't acknowledge that. But I guard against all the baggage of attributions that people might make and place on analytic idealism because of this acknowledgement. I'm not talking about a God sitting in a throne and deciding the fate of man in a capricious, deliberate way. I'm talking about a spontaneous unfolding of natural processes that happen to be mental in nature.

1:11:57Bernardo Kastrup:Okay, yeah. I mean, people will be interested in the sort of parallels here, but I think you're right. It's also maybe not that interesting to get into the details of that. It's just worth sort of pointing out that that's an avenue people can explore. But speaking of views that people think sort of border on religious that come with a lot of interesting metaphysical baggage. I've talked a lot recently about the view called panpsychism that starts with a similar assumption about the nature of science and materialism that it doesn't explain what we need it to explain. Materialism and science, they describe the world, they tell us what an electron does, but they don't tell us what an electron is.

1:12:40And there's only one thing

1:12:41Bernardo Kastrup:in the universe that we experience for itself, like the is-ness, and that is experience. We experience experience itself. And so if we've got this sort of ontological gap at the bottom of physics that we don't know what stuff is ultimately made out of, we know what it does, but we don't know what it is. And in our everyday experience, there's only one thing that we know the isness of, and that's consciousness, experience. Why don't we take that isness and plug up that ontological gap? And you get this view of panpsychism that there is a real world out there. You know, there's a, there's really an airport's case, right, that I'm holding in my hand.

1:13:20It's, it's made up of stuff that I can touch.

1:13:22Bernardo Kastrup:It's just that if you really get to grips with what it is, it's made up of like really rudimentary foundational consciousness. Some people listening to this podcast thus far might actually be under the sort of apprehension that that's kind of what you're saying. But importantly, you're not a panpsychist. It is not what I'm saying. You don't like it very much. So I'm just hoping you could tell us why that's the case and what the important differences are. So there are two important questions about panpsychism. I'll name them and then I will elaborate a little more. One is a distinction between property and essence, and the other one is where are the boundaries of psychic complexes?

1:13:58So there are at least two variations of panpsychism. One would say qualea states or phenomenal states or experiential states are something that elementary subatomic particles have, just like they have mass, they have spin, they have charge, they have qualea states. That's the property idea. And the other is the essence idea. Elementary subatomic particles are qualia states, and the other properties are the external manifestation of the inner essence, which is qualitative. So charge, mass, momentum, and all that, spin, are the manifestations of qualitative inner essences. The latter is the only plausible formulation of panpsychism.

1:14:51The idea of phenomenal states as properties just doesn't work. Look, unless you ask me to, I'm not even going to spend time on that. Because the way you prompted the question sort of assumes that we are talking about essence, not property. Right. And the second question is, where are the boundaries of psychic complexities? Because to have quali estates means that there is something it is like to be this entity that has quali estates. What are the experiential boundaries of this entity? Under panpsychism, it will be the boundaries of elementary subatomic particles. So there is something that is like to be an electron.

1:15:31There is something that is like to be a moon, a quark, and so on. And these tiny microscopic consciousnesses, they come together in our nervous system, in our brain. They combine their inner lives to form the seemingly unitary inner life that I consider to be myself and that you consider to be yourself. Now, this combination is a problem. It is as problematic as the hard problem of consciousness. There doesn't seem to be a coherent way to describe what this combination consists of, even in principle. But there are other problems with panpsychism that I think are so much more definitive and severe that we don't even need to have a discussion whether the combination problem is real, really insoluble or not.

1:16:27We don't even get to that point. Panpsychism, or to be more rigorous, microconstitutive panpsychism, which is what I was describing. Panpsychism as a word is so broad, it could even be idealism, but we are talking about microconstitutive panpsychism. it makes one assumption that is just physically incoherent it assumes something that is just not true and we have known that it's not true at least since the 1940s with Richard Feynman and quantum electron dynamics arguably since the late 20s but I'm not going to go there because it's polemical and that is that elementary subatomic particles are discrete things with defined physical boundaries.

1:17:22Because that's the key assumption of the panpsychist. My thoughts are separate from yours because the little elementary particles inside my head, although they touch each other and combine to form my inner life, they are physically separate from the elementary somatomic particles inside your skull. And that's why they don't combine with yours. And that's why I have access to my thoughts, but not to yours. So the whole thing, it's a sandcastle built on top of this assumption that elementary subatomic particles are things and have discrete spatial boundaries. Neither of these statements is true.

1:18:06They are demonstrably and empirically false in physics. There are no elementary subatomic particles. When we call them elementary, what we mean is that they are not constituted of other types of subatomic particles. A proton is made of quarks. So a proton is not elementary. A quark is elementary. But that doesn't mean that the quark is irreducible. It only means that there aren't other particles inside the quark, as there are other particles inside the proton. and the neutron. In physics, and we have known this for at least 80 years, there are no particles. It's a metaphor for identifiable patterns of excitation of an underlying quantum field.

1:19:01There are only quantum fields. And this is not only theory. A great many things would become unaccountable for and magical without this notion. Let me give you at least a couple of examples. Particle decay would become magical. You know, people say we found the Higgs boson. We did, but we never measured the Higgs boson because it decays before it interacts with the measurement surface. It decays much too quickly to be measured directly. What we measure are the particles the Higgs boson decays into, like it can decay into two muons, heavy muons, for instance. But it's not made of two heavy muons.

1:19:42So you would have to say under this notion that particles are things with spatial boundaries, you would have to say that the Higgs boson magically disappears into nothingness and two muons magically appear out of nothingness. That's magical thinking. That's not what's happening. What's happening is that there is no Higgs boson. There is an excitation of the Higgs field. That excitation decays. It's like one big ripple decays into other types of ripples, just like ripples actually do, like waves decay into ripples, if you observe the ocean carefully enough. So nothing magical is happening. It's just that when we talk about elementary subatomic particles, it's a metaphor, a metaphor that is perpetuated because it's so operationally useful.

1:20:29Feynman with quantum electrodynamics was the first one to understand well at least that we know to understand it that there are no particles there are only fields and yet he operationalized that in the form of so-called Feynman diagrams which draw little particles as little points and little arrows connecting them so we can see the interactions so that perpetuated the operational usefulness of the metaphor but to think as the panpsychist does, that the metaphor is actually literally true, is just a basic and like bachelor level misunderstanding of what physics is saying. There cannot be particles as things.

1:21:16Look, even inertia, mass, inertial mass, the stuff that things are made of, what is the key characteristic of what we mean by stuff. It's inertial mass. It's the fact that if a train is moving, it's very hard to stop it. And if a train is at rest, it's very hard to get it moving. That's inertial. It's resistance to changes in the vector of movement, be it in speed or direction. The only way we explain mass, and I'm not going to be rigorous in what I'm about to say, and some physicists will say, ah, Bernardo, come on, but it's a pod, guys, it's a podcast. And I'm not talking to physicists. The way the Higgs boson explains inertial mass is not because it's a particle, but because it is a excitation of a field.

1:22:11It is the Higgs field that provides the stickiness that resists changes in movement. That can only be explained by the Higgs field. That's the mechanism of inertia. So we wouldn't be able to explain mass, to explain existence, if particles were little billiard balls with defined spatial boundaries. That's not what they are. This is an operational metaphor that is useful. It's much simpler to write down a Feynman diagram than to solve the equations of QFT. That's why we keep talking about particles. There are no particles. So the very fundamental assumption of the penpsychist is untrue. There are only fields, probably only one, but right now we mathematically model 17, and they are spatially unbound.

1:23:05So if the panpsychist wants to be consistent with this approach of saying consciousness is inherent to what is ontologically irreducible, then you have to put consciousness in the field. And the field has no spatial boundaries. And therefore, the panpsychist cannot account for why your thoughts are not accessible to me. Because it's the same fields spanning this spatial location here where I am and yours. They span the entirety of nature. They are not bound. So panpsychism, sorry, microconstitutive panpsychism is a non-starter because it's started. Starter because it's predicated on a very basic misunderstanding of physics.

1:23:50Bernardo Kastrup:Yeah, so we can use the word panpsychism to describe microconstitutive panpsychism just because we can just stipulate that that's what we're talking about to save time a little bit here. Okay. And it's an idea that I've been exploring a lot. my listeners will probably know that but i've sort of been thinking about how best to cash it out and i do sort of have this this thought that like well you know the universe is made up of smaller and smaller stuff and maybe that really small stuff is just consciousness but it does seem really weird that you can take a bunch of little points and sort of put them all together and get one big thing so like well maybe it's better to think of one big thing rather than lots and lots of little things right but you've still got this like localized excitation of the field right and i suppose what i want to ask about is like suppose i wanted to defend a version of panpsychism and it might just be that if panpsychism becomes defensible it just starts looking like analytic idealism i can understand that but let's say you know in the same way that the physicist talks about particles even though what they're really talking about is an excitation in the field they use the word particles just to sort of you know allow us to functionally do science the panpsychus does the same thing in talking about these fundamental units of consciousness what they're really talking about is excitations in this sort of big mental field but like there is still the excitation and what physics calls a fundamental particle like an electron or a quark you know i'm thinking that is in some way i wouldn't know how to quite describe this but that is whatever the like most rudimentary or fundamental kind of vibration or excitation of the quantum field that could exist that's kind of how i imagine what saying something is a fundamental particle means it's just for whatever reason it's just the most fundamental kind of excitation that can occur okay that's fair it's the pixel of the field yeah yeah so so why can't the panpsychist just say yeah okay we're talking about vibrations in a field i just think that the fundamental like unit of consciousness is the most fundamental kind of excitation of the field the field is not conscious it's the excitations that are consciousness and so those tiny little rudimentary excitations are like the particles, quote-unquote, of panpsychism.

1:26:17Bernardo Kastrup:And so I am kind of talking about a field still. I'm using your language. It's just like the physicist talks about particles, I'm talking about particles. But really, it's just an excitation of a field. Would that still be panpsychism? And if not, like, why not? No.

1:26:35Words are important, right? Otherwise, you can say physicalism is true because all physical states are actually mental states. We just call them physical. Well, that's truth by word redefinition. That's the point where you can throw words away because they don't mean anything anymore. So assuming that this word panpsychism has differentiated meaning, then you would have to ask yourself, what are we talking about? Are we talking about a pixel of experience or are we talking about a defined subject that is fundamentally separate from other defined subjects? The latter is what panpsychism would say.

1:27:17It's not only a pixel on the screen of unified experience. There are lots of pixels in the screen of my unified experience right now. I see yellows, I see whites, blacks, greens, browns. They are discernible, but there is only one subjectivity, the one subjectivity that is experiencing all this variety of qualiostates. The statement of panpsychism is not that an elementary subatomic particle is a pixel on the screen of experience, but that it is a subject separate from other subjects. The moment you do that, then you are no longer consistent with physics because for there to be this multitude of subjects, elementary subatomic particles have to be a multitude of things.

1:28:05But they are not things. Just like a ripple on the lake is not a thing. You cannot fish it out of the lake, put it under your armpit, and go home with it. The ripple is a doing of the lake. There is only ever the lake. And elementary subatomic particles in physics, quantum field theory, the best scientific theory ever created by mankind by orders of magnitude, elementary subatomic particles are ripples on the lake. They are not things. Therefore, you cannot associate separate subjectivities to each one of them because they are not there, just like the ripple is not there. There is only ever the lake.

1:28:45So if words are to be useful, we cannot massage them to a point where they no longer carry any meaning. The reason I'm saying that, I had a discussion a couple of years ago. the very famous physicist whose name will remain unsaid. It was at 3 a.m. And it was via the internet. And after wrestling with each other for a long time, he said, Menaro, you know what? Suppose it's all mental states, like you're saying. And they're really out there. And they behave according to regularities that we can model theoretically. Why don't we just call them physical states? And that point I threw the hat. It's like, okay, if that's how we are going to do this, you know, redefining words to mean what nobody else assumes them to mean, like I will redefine physicality as mentation.

1:29:40And yeah, then physicalism is true. Okay. But I mean, we are just creating confusion here, right? We should stick to the meaning of words.

1:29:50Bernardo Kastrup:Yeah. Okay. So this will help me out then, right? Like the panpsychist thinks that there's something it's like to be an electron, right? you don't think that correct i do not but you think but you do think that the electron as an excitation of the wave is like what like made out of mentality i think people might be thinking hold on if everything is like mental or mental states i think as you put it isn't kind of a definition of a mental state that there's sort of something it's like to experience that because a mental state is a kind of experience. You know what I mean? Yeah. But a kind of experience can be merged in a sort of, can be subsumed in a broader field of experience.

1:30:34For instance, I see many pixels right now, but they all subsume into the unified experience that I call my inner life, Bernardo's inner life right now. Let me give you a concrete, let's make it concrete. There is something it is like to be my ego complex. In other words, my default mode network, a subset of my neurons arranged in a causal structure that is active when I'm not engaged in any particular task. So the default mode network. there is something it is like to be my default mode network when I think about it right now when I think of myself, of my inner experience right now so there is something it is like to be those neurons in my head but there is nothing it is like to be one individual neuron in the default mode network right?

1:31:38at least there is nothing I can access that tells me there is something it is like to be a single neuron in my head. There is only something it is like to be the entirety of my default mode network. What is a neuron then? A neuron is a segment of the image that my default mode network appears to be from outside observation. A segment of a unified image. and that segment is arbitrarily carved out by us. There is no such a thing as a neuron. Where is the boundary of a neuron? Is it a synaptic cleft? Well, there isn't a vacuum in a synaptic cleft. It's all filled with stuff. It's just that our pattern recognition in our linguistic dictionary give us a word for a subset of that unified image that we call a neuron and leads to the question, is there something it is like to be a neuron in and of itself?

1:32:39The answer is no, because there is no neuron. A neuron is not a thing. It's like taking a painting and arbitrarily carving out all the pigment points that are roughly yellow, putting a boundary around them and saying, that's a thing, give a name to it, X. Is there something it is like to be X? No, because there is no X. It's an arbitrary carving out of an image, right? Okay, so yeah, I can see how that works. like a neuron. Just carry on. There is nothing it's like to be this water bottle I'm holding in my hand because there is no bloody water bottle. We think that things we have a word for are actual things.

1:33:21We project the structure of our language onto the ontological structure of the world. That's why we get all confused. That's why the panpsychist has to answer questions like, if there is something that's like to be a table, Suppose I remove one of the four legs. Does the leg that I now removed acquire a consciousness of its own separate from the rest of the table? The answer is no, because there is no table. There is no table leg. There is only the inanimate universe as a whole.

1:33:51Bernardo Kastrup:okay so i think i get what you're saying i don't know what you're like i don't know if you can sort of separate out your metaphysics of objects right but there's luckily we're in good company and that if i say a phrase like myriological nihilism there's a good chance that a fair few of the people listening will actually know what that means but is that the kind of view you're getting at that that there's no sort of real distinction between like material objects and we're just kind of organizing stuff and putting like a label on it? I think there are actual distinctions in the world that have physical correlates, but they are not the boundaries projected by our language.

1:34:32For instance, an example I gave you earlier, if I stick a needle in my arm, I feel it. If I stick a needle in the arm of my chair, I don't feel it. That's an ontological boundary right there there is a differentiation in one case i feel in the other one i don't so i am i seem to be a real thing and i have grounds empirical grounds to say that i am a separate thing because the middle but you want to go further than that and say not only like is you

1:35:01Bernardo Kastrup:know the the arm of the chair not a part of me but also when i stab the arm of the chair the chair doesn't feel it now common sensically of course it doesn't but on this view people might be listening and going well hold on a second you know if we're all just sort of excitations of a field why do i feel the stabbing of the arm but how do you know the chair doesn't feel the stabbing of its arm there is no chair the chair is an arbitrarily carved out subset of a great image a great appearance a great show that we call the inanimate universe is there something it is like to be the inanimate universe as a whole?

1:35:40Yes. Does that complex, the inanimate universe as a whole, feel when I stick a needle in the chair? Yes. Is it pain? No. I would be anthropomorphizing the mind of nature if I did that. Is it significant? No. It's nothing. It's like you're registering the flotation of one neurotransmitter cell across one synaptic cleft. I mean, yes, it builds up to an experience that you do register, but that specific little thing is negligible. It's infinitesimally insignificant, right? So yes, the picture is coherent. Any action in nature is felt by something, by some complex, but the boundaries across complex seas are not the boundaries between things that we call things because we have distinct words for them, like the leg of a table as opposed to the table as a whole, or where does the river end and the ocean begin?

1:36:44So the distinction between inanimate things is merely nominal. We do it for convenience. If you want to buy a thing that allows you to move from A to B, we call it a car and you go buy a car. But a car is not a thing. Without gravity, to push it to the road, it wouldn't run. Without air for combustion, it wouldn't run. Without solar radiation to grow the plants that became petroleum and that have burned in the internal combustion engine, it wouldn't run. There is no car. There is only the inanimate universe as a whole and living beings within it. That's my view.

1:37:20Bernardo Kastrup:But I really want to know where we're getting this ontological distinction, because believe me, I'm extremely comfortable with the idea that chairs don't exist, and that's fine by me. but it seems like if if the only thing that exists is the quantum field or the great mind and then there are excitations within that mind and that's it right what i'm calling this chair the physical stuff that i call this chair is just an excitation of the quantum field what i call my brain and my hands and the way that they touch each other is also just a vibration an excitation of the quantum field correct but one of those vibrations one of those excitations is a thing and one of them is not is not and like why and how do we know that you know what i mean yes well we know it empirically uh my ability to feel ends on the surface of my skin and then the surface of my retina you know if a photon bounces off the wall behind me i don't register it.

1:38:33If it hits my retina, I do register it. So it's pretty empirical in the case of living beings. What determines when an excitation or a pattern of excitations is a thing or is not? It's the boundary of the complexities. Mental states form these causal structures that we call complexities and there is something it is like to be a complex as a whole. Where are the boundaries of of the complex seas? That's the question. If there is a bounded complex, then that's a thing. The appearance of it deserves the name or the reference of being a thing because it's bounded by the boundaries of the psychic complex, which determine what it feels like to be that thing as opposed to something else.

1:39:26In psychiatry, this has been known for 200 years as dissociation, which is a vastly empirically demonstrated thing that happens to us all. Some people have extreme forms of dissociation, like dissociative personality disorder. It used to be called multiple personality disorder. But we don't need to go that far. When you fall asleep in your dream, you are dissociated. You think you are your dream avatar, or in fact you are the whole dream, including the world in which your dream avatar is moving. When we wake up, the dissociation ends. We know then that we were both the dream avatar and the rest of the dream.

1:40:08We were doing the whole thing. So complexes can split apart and join according to a dynamics of integrated information, which has been mathematically formulated already. And depending on how they join and split, boundaries form or dissolve. and that's the play of association and dissociation this is known clinically it happens in mental space when it comes to human minds all we need is to extrapolate it one layer of abstraction higher and say it happens in the mind of nature and that's what determines what are things

1:40:45Bernardo Kastrup:i i think i would be i wouldn't have been surprised if when i said like you know okay there are no chairs there's just a bunch of stuff and we sort of put a label on it and all at a chair so what about like what about you know selves like minds and i wouldn't have been surprised if you said something like well you remember alex how earlier i said that you know the individuated self is an illusion and that there's only one self that we all kind of participate in it's the same kind of thing there's no chair there's no you there's no me there is just the mind and excitations and so it's it's a little bit that's why i'm like it's a little surprising to hear you say actually no there are these these sort of things which seem to sort of fulfill this role of the self.

1:41:26Bernardo Kastrup:Like there's me and there's the limits of my experience and you're using words like me and my and I. Yes. And I just wondered sort of how those go together. Well, the personal me, the I is an illusion, but an illusion is not nothing. An illusion is happening. It could have not happened conceivably. So we have to account for the fact of the illusion And we account for that through this notion of association and dissociation, how the dynamics of integrated information form complexes and dissolve complexes. This is a crucial point. To say that something is an illusion means only that it's not what it seems to be or that it doesn't have fundamental existence.

1:42:11But you still have to account for the mechanism of the illusion. Why is this illusion happening? How is it coming about? An illusion is not nothing. it exists as such as an illusion needs to be accounted for that's what i can i say then that that there are things but things are illusions correct that makes sense yes okay because because okay that makes a bit more sense to me and just to be clear are the only things which exist the great big mind the great big quantum field and that exists that is a thing and it's not an illusion. And the only other things that exist as things are unified conscious agents, but those are illusions.

1:42:57Is that a fair way of putting it all? Yes. They're illusions in the sense that they are not fundamental, they are reducible, in the sense that they are not permanent, they are changing all the time. Think about your five-year-old self. It's preposterous for you to think that you were your five-year-old self, because not a single atom in the body of your five-year-old self has remained in yours all this time. Some of them have left and returned, but not a single one has stayed there all along. Your thoughts are different. Your emotions are different. Your outlook is different. Your appearance is completely different.

1:43:30It's preposterous to say you were your five-year-old self unless you want to be consistent and say, no, I was my five-year-old self. But by the same token, then you have to say you are me and I am you. by exactly the same token. So either you were not your five-year-old self or the whole thing is an illusion. And this is critical. In science, the illusions have to be accounted for. You don't get a free ticket of explanatory power by saying it's an illusion, therefore I don't have to say anything about it. No, wait a moment. You don't get that free pass.

1:44:08Bernardo Kastrup:Yeah, okay. so to be clear there are no there are no things other than like unified like conscious agents like it's not just that oh chairs aren't things but maybe like you know planets are or something it's just like egos and the great mind are those like the only things that really exist well i cannot know with absolute certainty because we are monkeys running around the rock for only 300 000 years, so what do we know? I don't think we have good reason to entertain hypotheses like the moon has a consciousness of its own, a private consciousness in their life of its own. Or I don't think we have good enough reasons to think even of a star as having a private consciousness in their life of its own.

1:44:56There is someone I respect, Rupert Childrake, who thinks there are good reasons for that. And that has to do with the patterns of electromagnetic fields in the sun's corona, which are incredibly complex, more complex than what's happening in our brain. But there is an obvious difference in form and function when you compare a brain to a star, right? So I wouldn't go that far. I think we have excellent reasons to think of all life as having consciousness in a life of its own. And in fact, what we call life or biology or metabolism may be the appearance of the formation of dissociated complexities in the mind of nature.

1:45:32That may be what life is. Now, when the mind of nature has dissociative identity disorder and forms alters, what does an alter look like? Well, it looks like a biological organism, a metabolizing organism, just like the alters in the mind of a patient with dissociative identity disorder look like something identifiable in an fMRI scan. we don't need an fMRI tool because we are inside the mind of nature we just need to look around to find the other authors there is one talking to me right now so I would go this far I think we have excellent reasons to think of all life as having private conscience in their life of its own but I don't think we have good reasons to say the same about anything else because everything else is so completely distinct from life that doesn't mean that I know for certain that nothing else has a private conscience in a life of its own.

1:46:28Maybe the sun has. I don't know. I just don't think we have good enough reasons to entertain the hypothesis seriously.

1:46:35Bernardo Kastrup:So I don't necessarily want you to commit yourself to saying whether the sun does have that, but if it did, it would then become a thing in your language. Yes. Whereas right now you think there is no sun in the way that there is no chair. it's just correct sort of it would become an illusory thing sure so just and also to be clear for our listeners use the word like alter i'm not sure if we defined it earlier but in like dissociative personality disorders people who feel like they've kind of got multiple personalities going on in the brain those individual personalities within the same person's brain are called alters you know there's like you know one day i'm jenny the next day i'm mark and you sort of provide an analogy here that the universe is like the big brain and we are alters of this universal sort of mind which is experiencing a kind of extreme form of dissociation between its own parts yes without the connotation that it's an illness it's just something that can happen in nature so given enough time it's bound to happen lo and behold it did yeah and that's how we end up as we are i think yeah it's a lot to chew on and i mean i think it's i think it's it's fascinating you know you there's always a joke to be made whenever i speak about consciousness when i want to say something like you know you've you've kind of blown my mind there's always a really boring joke to be made about how you've like blown your own mind or something i'm trying to work out what the best one is here but whatever it is it's really interesting and i've been you know looking at your work for for some time now and in preparation for this i think it's fascinating i am intrigued to know the extent to which people who are interacting with your views for the first time right now in this episode think that this is a really interesting line worth pursuing as i do or think that we've both sort of lost our minds as it were um there's another one um do you find that there is perhaps to close then just on that thought do you find that there is a consistent and understandable, but most common misunderstanding that people have when they listen to your lectures or read your books that you might want to take an opportunity to clear up that we maybe haven't cleared up already?

1:48:49To say that everything is mental is not to say that everything is in your mind. It doesn't contradict the existence of a world outside our minds. The problem is that the physicalist thinks that anything outside a personal mind must be non-mental. Why? I mean, if you look to the horizon, it's earth all the way until the horizon. You know there is a world beyond the horizon. Do you think it's something other than earth or just more earth? So what I'm saying is that beyond the boundaries of individual dissociated minds. It's just more mind, not your mind, not a mind that follows your wishes and obeys your imagination and your morning affirmations.

1:49:36And no, it's not you, the illusory dissociated you, but it is mental. It has an inner perspective of its own, and it may unfold in a way that is very regular, very predictable, almost mechanical, because it's an instinctive mind, not a mind that evolved over 4 billion years to deliberate and plan so to conquer the world.

1:50:02Bernardo Kastrup:I think it's helpful to remember that we are in the universe. We are a part of the universe. And in the way that you want to speak of individuated selves as just like excitations of a great big field, that might sound a bit weird to a physicalist, but I think the physicalist needs to remember that they think the same thing. They also believe that the universe is just sort of made up of particles, which modern science tells us is just an excitation of a quantum field, and that consciousness is just a product of the brain, and that brains are just atoms, which are just excitations of the field, which means that all you are as a conscious agent is an excitation of a great big field.

1:50:43Bernardo Kastrup:Your view is to say, we know that there's consciousness, we know that there's mentality, we're experiencing it right now. And since the best understanding of what we are excitations of a great big field that field is mental you know that's just what's going on yeah the physicalist kind of goes the other way they start with the field and say that there's this thing called a field and somehow consciousness fits into it or comes out of it but but it's actually not that that far away it almost feels like when i speak to someone like you that you're taking assumptions that are already agreed upon by a physicalist and just flipping them on their ahead yes like mental activity is just the same thing as as brain activity because mental because brain activity is just what it looks like from the outside whereas they go the other way you know mental activity comes from comes from the brain you're like well actually just the appearance of the brain comes from the mental stuff it's almost like the same desire for synthesis and monism and there's only one stuff that the universe is made out of but just you know looking at it in a mirror Yes, I thought about what you're saying.

1:51:50There is a commonality of values. I spouse rationalism, determinism, reductionism, and monism.

1:52:06physicalists however tend to think that the only rationalist reductionist deterministic and monistic alternative on the table is physicalism that is a astounding level of lack of theoretical creativity and philosophical blindness we do espouse the same values but i I submit to you that the only reason you think what I'm saying is mind-blowing and physicalism is level-headed is cultural indoctrination. Physicalism is the most magical, arbitrary, gratuitous, inflationary, ridiculous metaphysical alternative on the table. that physicalists espouse the same values I espouse doesn't mean that physicalism is consistent with those values.

1:53:04It is not. If you think it is, it's because you haven't given it more serious thought. You're just absorbing all the slob that comes via the airways in Hescom for over 200 years now. Yeah.

1:53:18Bernardo Kastrup:I've got to say, yeah, I mean, I'm pretty convinced now that materialism is just about as long as people understand biomaterialism, the way that we're characterizing it in this conversation. I am pretty convinced that it is quite ludicrous. I've been exploring panpsychism as one solution to that. In your book, you discuss panpsychism under a chapter titled something like the solution is worse than the problem or something. It's like you're actually making it worse. Let's get back on track. You don't explain anything. You just shove another thing in your reduction base. In other words, you're not accounting for anything.

1:53:57You're just adding more brute facts in nature. It doesn't have any explanatory power. That's why I call it the solution is worse than the problem.

1:54:05Bernardo Kastrup:Yeah, well, I've got lots to think about because I've been attracted to views like panpsychism, I think mostly due to the motivation that something like physicalism can't work, at least as pertains to consciousness, but probably to anything at all. and I think you know your book does this quite helpfully you sort of go it's like it's what like chapter five or six when in your book analytical idealism in a nutshell when you first start talking about analytical idealism because you have to follow this trajectory and got a lot to think about but I definitely think I mean when you said there you know the only reason why you would see this view is as more sensible than than another view the only reason you'd see physicalism as sensible is because of this sort of worldview that you've swallowed wholesale I agree.

1:54:50I personally, for myself, I don't see it as a particularly viable option.

1:54:56Bernardo Kastrup:And for me now, the task is trying to speak to people like you and work out what the most viable option is. And I can see why so many people are attracted to what you have to say. And if they are, especially if they've listened to this and found it interesting, but maybe raised too many questions or didn't cover enough detail or a bit of confusion going on, then those books I mentioned will be linked in the description. You've got a corpus of works, but I think those are the two to point people to for these particular topic areas. But Bernardo Kastrup, thank you for coming. You've been one of the most requested guests I've had since starting the show, to be honest.

1:55:26Bernardo Kastrup:And it's always a bit of a catch-22 for me because I kind of need to have read or seen enough of someone's work to know if they're going to be right for me and for the show. But if I don't know if they're going to be right for me in the show, it's a lot of work to put in. But your name came up so many, so many times, especially as I began to start talking about consciousness and I can see why having now read some of your work and spoken to you today it's been really interesting so thank you very thank you very much for your time and all links will be in the description it's been a pleasure the grill is shot the chairs are held together by optimism and what happened to the rug sounds like your outdoor setup is not ready for patio season fix it all with Wayfair shop Wayfair for grills rugs furniture and more with 20 million five-star reviews, room of choice delivery, and experts set up on qualifying orders, it's never been easier to do more for less.

1:56:19Get 10 % off your first eligible purchase. Hurry to Wayfair.com or download the app now. Thanks for having me.