Escaping The Illusion Bernardo Kastrup Exposes Reality

TITLE: Escaping the Illusion: Bernardo Kastrup Exposes Reality CHANNEL: Curt Jaimungal DATE: 2021-02-20 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I’m revealing myself more now to you than I have ever done in an interview. Thank you, man, it’s been quite an experience. I’m grateful to you. It’s not been a usual interview. I give 2, 3, 4 interviews per week and usually it’s the same thing and this has not been that. So I’m grateful to you, thanks a lot. A couple days ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Bernardo Kastrup who holds two 2 PhDs, one in computer science and the other in philosophy. He also has a host of accolades. So for example, he’s worked at CERN. He’s also sold a fairly large company to IBM. When someone like that comes along and suggests that all we experience, all that we see, all that is traditional physical matter is actually taking place within the mind and that we’re all part of one mind, that is a particular philosophical doctrine called analytical idealism. Then I take him seriously. And I’m glad that I did, because I had one of the best, if not the best, conversations that I’ve ever had, let alone on this podcast. We were scheduled to talk for approximately 2 hours, and we ended up going for almost 5. The timestamps, as usual, are in the description, so feel free to skip ahead to whichever section you like. And I wanted to put a special thank you out there to my Patreon supporters. I do this with almost all my time, so the small amount or the large amount that you give helps me tremendously. Thank you, thank you so much, and please enjoy the podcast. Well, I want you to know that I admire you. I’ve watched your work for the past maybe 2 weeks, 1.5 weeks straight, just inputting you into my brain, and I think you’re the most articulate and coherent, not only of those who are idealists, but of those who oppose materialism and physicalism in general. Thank you, sir. When I get to the questions about mind at large, I do have questions about, well, given that mind at large or mind itself is naturally deceptive, well, how do we discern what’s true from what’s not? So we’ll get to that later. I think as a great overview for the audience, instead of explicitly talking about what your views are, why don’t you talk about how you came upon your views? Because most of the people who oppose materialism or physicalism, I find they are raised in a Vedic tradition or a Buddhist tradition or a Hindu tradition, and they already have a predisposition to wanting consciousness to be one and united with all. But yours isn’t this a priori conclusion where you then looked at the data and tried to fit it to what you believe. I think that’s interesting. I think that you need to tell the audience about where you started and where you got to, and in there, talk about your theories. So I, you know, I’ve always been a philosopher in the sense that I’ve always asked the big questions. What is this? What is the world? What is life? What is this strange condition of being alive and having to eat and breathe to fight entropy? I mean, this has always interested me. And then I very early went to computer engineering school. I had just turned 17 because I was fascinated by computers and artificial intelligence since very early. And then 5 years of that, and you have very little time to ask philosophical questions when you’re doing computer engineering. There’s a lot to absorb. Absorb. But later on, already I was in my late 20s. I had already gotten my first PhD. And I was— What was it on precisely? What was your thesis? Computer processor architectures, reconfigurable computing, which is, you know, processors that can rewire themselves during program execution, which was all the rave in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Now it’s sort of incorporated into commercial processors. But at the time it was very innovative. And then I was already in the early days of my professional life, first few years. And AI continued to be a big interest of mine. I was even as a hobby, I was at home thinking about, you know, how do you get a processor not only to be intelligent, to be sentient? And of course, I had hidden materialist assumptions behind that question because I thought of consciousness, of sentience, as something that you create, that you bring about, that you bring into being. And I was cracking my head about, you know, how to make a computer sentient. And I was reading the work of people like that Finnish guy that used to work at Nokia Research. I forgot his name. He wrote a book called Conscious Machines. Penti Haikkinen, his name, Penti Haikkinen. And he had what to me at the time was the most compelling articulation of how to create artificial sentience at the time. But at some point I realized that, you know, this was a nag I couldn’t crack because I was starting from wrong assumptions. And I had this insight after reading a paper by David Chalmers in which he discussed the hard problem of consciousness. He didn’t solve it. He just framed it. And framing a problem well is half the solution, because it makes you alert to the issues that you had been ignoring before. And when I read the statement of the problem, it clicked. I thought, I’m coming about it from a completely arbitrary direction. I’m making arbitrary assumptions. Consciousness is not something you create. It’s that within which every creation happens, including the creation of a computer. And I am conflating artificial intelligence with artificial sentience. These are completely different things. And we have a lot of reasons to think that one of them will be successful, namely strong AI. But we have absolutely no reason to think that we can create an artificially conscious being, any more reason than we have to think that by simulating kidney function on my computer, the computer will urinate on my desk. And that for me was sort of the trigger to rethink everything, to examine every hidden assumption I had ever made, to sort of completely refurbish my worldview along more reasonable, explicit, coherent lines. And it was quite an enterprise. But ultimately, I came to answers that were quite satisfying to me in the sense that I couldn’t shoot them down. I couldn’t shoot down my own answers after a few years. And I was only glad to realize that, hey, the sages of the Hindu valley 3,500 years ago had come to the same answers. And so did people in the Western tradition— Plato, Schopenhauer, to mention two, Jung. And that surely gave reassurance. But I came to my views based on my own painful process of reasoning, looking at the evidence, examining my own assumptions, and parting with those that were incoherent and illogical, even if they were aligned with the assumptions and views that I inherited from my culture. So what are your conclusions? Why don’t you state the metaphysical assumptions of materialism and how they compare and contrast with yours? Okay, for a materialist, there is experience, but it’s created inside our brains in a way that nobody can, can describe explicitly and coherently. And there is a world outside experience, which is Pure abstraction. It’s a world that has no colors, has no scents, has no flavors, because colors, scents, and flavors are experiences created in our brain, inside our, our skull. That’s, that’s what— that’s the assumption of materialism. And so the real world of materialism is a world of abstraction describable through quantities, a list of quantities such as mass, charge, momentum, position, amplitude, frequency, weight, and so on and so forth. And if you provide this complete list of numbers, then you’ve said everything there is to say about matter, about the world outside, which of course leaves out all qualities. But qualities, according to materialism, are somehow epiphenomenal. They are created by matter inside the brain within our skulls. So the world of our experience for materialism exists entirely within our heads. If you look up to the sky at night and you see a bright star, that star, insofar as it’s constituted by by color is actually inside your skull. The inner surface of your skull is beyond the stars as you experience them under materialism, because the experience of the star is supposed to be conjured up inside your head by your brain. There is a real star beyond your skull, but that’s not the star you see. It’s the thing that somehow modulates the star you see. So that’s, that’s the mind twist that you have to do if you are to be consistent with materialism in your thinking. All the images you experience are inside your actual skull. The inner surface of your actual skull is beyond the room you see right now. There is a room beyond your skull, but that’s not your experience of it. It’s an abstract room describable —purely by quantities. It’s something you can’t even visualize, because if you visualize, you already put qualities in the mix. So that’s materialism, and its main problem is that nobody can provide a satisfying account of how quantities can possibly produce qualities. There seems to be a fundamental epistemic chasm between the two. There is nothing about quantities that would allow us to deduce, at least in principle, the qualities of experience. There is nothing about mass, charge, momentum that would allow us to deduce what it is like to see red. What it is like to fall in love or to have a bellyache. There is a correlation between these two things, but that correlation is not amenable to causation. It’s very difficult to coherently specify a chain of causation from quantities to qualities. Now, to me, this means that we have reduced materialism to absurdity. Not that we have a problem to solve, the hard problem of consciousness, how do you come with qualities starting from quantities, it’s not a problem to be solved. It just illustrates the contradictions of our assumptions. For me, what we call matter is not the cause of consciousness. It’s what certain mental processes look like from a certain perspective. I think the error we’ve made is twofold. The first error we made was to conflate images with the thing in itself. We think the world we see is the thing in itself, as opposed to the appearance, the representation, the image of the thing in itself. In other words, it’s what the thing in itself looks like when observed from a certain perspective. Matter is appearance. It’s what the thing in itself looks like. That’s why it sort of vanishes when you study quantum physics down to, to entanglement. Well, that was our first error. We conflate, we take the images, the representations to be the thing in itself. Error number one. Error number two, very related to the first. We try to replace reality with a description of reality. We try to pull the territory out of the map. Uh, we start from an experience of the outside world, a world of colors, of sounds, melodies, flavors, and then we describe that with quantities. Which is fine, we are creating a map of reality. But then we say the quantities, the map is primary. It comes before the world of experience. In other words, we replace reality with our description of reality. And that leads, of course, to impossible implications. But then we call it a problem and we promise ourselves we will solve the problem in the future. I mean, it’s pathetic. It’s quite ironic. I mean, future generations probably will be merciless about us because our errors are so obvious, but they are so enshrined in the culture that we can’t see them anymore. I think what’s happening is that the thing in itself is mentality. You see that every time you look in the mirror. If you’re sad and you’re crying and you look into the mirror, you see tears flowing down your face. But you will never think that the tears are the thing in itself, that the tears are the whole story, that the image in the mirror is the whole story. You know— Do you mean to say that the tears are not sadness? The sadness— Exactly. Exactly. A contorted face with tears in the mirror is not the sadness. It’s what the sadness looks like when observed from a certain perspective. It’s the appearance, the image, the representation of the sadness. But behind the image, behind the appearance, there is the thing in itself, the sadness, which is a mental event, a mental process. Let me see if I can make an analogy. Would it be like if you’re watching TV, a movie, or playing a video game, and you have a monitor, and the actual data is the RGB values, but then what we can see are explosions and faces, and it would be a mistake to think those secondary inferences, those faces and explosions, are fundamental, but the RGB values are the actual fundamental? That’s a fair analogy. We have to be careful because ultimately you’re talking about appearances being the images of other appearances, because the, the computing going on behind the images you see is also material. So from my perspective, it’s also an appearance. For me, matter is what mental processes look like from across a dissociative boundary. In other words, from a certain perspective, and that applies to all matter. But as a metaphor or as an analogy, it’s valid to go along these lines you just proposed. Okay, across a dissociative boundary. Why don’t you explain how dissociative identity disorder gives rise to some of how you view the world? Um, I, I can sort of immediately give an example from research. There was research done, I think at Harvard, um, several years ago. They studied patients with dissociative identity disorder, which are people who seem to have multiple alter personalities with different memories, different proclivities, different tastes, different ways of being. But they are in fact just dissociated aspects of a single mind, that person’s mind. Now, research has shown that when these people dream, um, different alter personalities can experience the same dream from different perspectives, and they can even see the other alters as other avatars within the same dream. I would say that this is a great metaphor for what might be happening right now, because the biggest argument against this idea that mind is fundamental is that I can’t read your thoughts, and presumably you can’t read mine. So if mind is fundamental, how come it seems to be so neatly bound by matter, if matter is derivative and mind fundamental? Well, I would suggest that what’s happening there is entirely analogous to what’s happening in the mind of a patient with dissociative identity disorder. When mental processes become inferentially, uh, separate from each other, when they can’t evoke one another, when memories become separate, personality traits become separate, we call it dissociation. And that dissociation is bound by a so-called dissociative boundary. We have plenty of empirical evidence for that in psychiatry, and we have proof that this is a real phenomenon since the beginning of neuroimaging 20 years ago. People with DID have particular identifiable recognizable patterns of brain activity that differ from those that do not have DID. People with DID can even be literally blind by dissociation. If an alter who is blind is in control of the body, mental activity or brain activity in the visual cortex has been shown to disappear, and that’s not something you can fake. When you’re looking around with with your eyes open and there is no activity in your, in your visual cortex. While when another alter comes and takes control of the body, that mental or that brain activity returns and is measurable again. And when you say alter, you mean one of those personalities? One of those personalities, yes. So traditionally it’s called multiple personality disorder or split personality disorder, and you’re just referring to one of those? Correct. The way that I understand this is that there’s mind at large and then it fractionates itself into smaller consciousnesses that each have their own proclivities and acts to memories that others don’t, much like multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. Okay, now what I’m wondering is, would this analogy still work if we didn’t refer to that person who has DID as one person? So for example, in your home right now, there’s you, there’s your cat, maybe there’s some other people. And when you enter and leave, I wouldn’t say that that’s Bernardo’s split personalities. I would say he has a home, and these are different people coming in and out. So part of the analogy you make is when we consider that person with multiple split— multiple personality disorder as a single individual split. But what if we don’t think of them as a single individual anymore? We think of them as actually housing different personalities. So then can you still make that analogy that it’s all one mind at large? Look, the experience of separation definitely exists. I’m having it right now. I can’t read your thoughts. I can’t know what’s happening in the galaxy of Andromeda, and I can’t influence the thoughts of the presidents of the world’s nations. If I could, the world would be looking very different, uh, right now. So it exists as an experience in the same way that the different alters of a person with DID experience the same dream from a different perspective. So the experience of separation exists. It would be silly to deny that because it’s a basic datum of existence. What I would say is that fundamentally there is no separation. That experience of separation is a form of illusion. Fundamentally, it’s all happening in one natural mind, a mind that spans across the universe like the theoretical quantum fields in quantum theory. The same boundlessness is implied there. But you see, if we have a theory of reality that does justice to reason and evidence, I think that theory would unavoidably point to this mental oneness at the most fundamental layer of reality. It wouldn’t invalidate our ordinary experience because they exist as such. They exist as experiences, but they could inform our judgment. They could inform even our ethical systems in a much healthier way than what’s going on right now. Because if you know, at least from thinking and evidence, from reason and evidence, that most likely we are all alters of one mind, I think we would look at our perceived enemies differently. We would look at underprivileged people in the world differently. We would regard animal life differently. And I think that would be a good step forward. What’s special about life that makes it such that it’s its own little dissociative identity, as opposed to, let’s say, a computer? And then— wait, here’s— sorry, to add to that, you were suggesting before that people get— well, this is in the literature— people get dissociative identity from trauma. So what I was wondering is, okay, so let’s say you give birth. What you’ve done is you’ve created some acausal chain within those nodes that you had in a PowerPoint slide before. People can’t see that right now, but maybe I can overlay that. So every time we give birth, or every time an ant gives birth, is the universe being traumatized in some way and it’s saying, I can’t handle this, let me create a new personality? I don’t think so. I think that’s an instance of taking the metaphor too far. What makes life special for us is that we are alive. But other than that, life is just one natural phenomenon amongst gazillions of natural phenomena. I would say a quasar is a very, very special natural phenomenon, a very impressive one. So is a black hole. I think what we call life biology is what dissociation looks like when observed from across its dissociative boundary. It’s the image of the phenomenon. To make an analogy, there was a neuroimaging study of dissociative identity disorder that was carried out in the Netherlands, where I am, in 2014 by Jolanda Schlumpf and collaborators. And they have shown that if you image the activity in the brain of a person with dissociative Dissociative Identity Disorder, those dissociative processes have a certain image. They look like something identifiable. You can point at them and say, “Hey, this is the pattern of brain activity we see when the person is dissociated.” So there is something dissociative processes look like in the brain of a person with DID. I would go as far with this analogy as to say, well, when the universe undergoes dissociative identity disorder or something metaphorically related to dissociative identity disorder, Those natural dissociative processes in the universe also look like something. There must be something it looks like. Every phenomenon in nature looks like something when observed from a given perspective. So, so must dissociation be. It must look like something. And I would offer to you that what it looks like is what we call biology, that life is the image of that dissociation. Now, How the first living organism has arisen, how the mind of nature dissociated for the first time, I don’t know. Could, could we drag the idea of trauma to, to this boundless natural mind? Maybe. I see something to that, but it’s not necessarily the case for, for the theory to hold. I would just entertain this idea as an interesting extra. Um, but now beyond that point, beyond those initial dissociations, maybe one has happened and then died off, and then it happened again in a different way. Eventually it didn’t die off. From that point on, we can apply the theory of natural evolution verbatim to this. I, I’m not offering a new science. I’m offering a new interpretation of science from a metaphysical perspective. Evolution still holds. What is maintaining the dissociative processes is that For, for some reason, at some point, one dissociative process arose that could create another, that could maintain that dissociation. And that it could do that is sufficient to account for why it did, for why it continues to do. Because that’s what evolution by natural selection tells us: if an organism can reproduce more effectively, it will pass on the ability to reproduce more effectively to its to its descendants. And merely because it’s more effective at that, it will predominate and it will continue to exist. And so dissociation has come to 7.5 billion human beings plus countless kazillions of other living beings on this Earth, because it’s the mechanism of evolution by natural selection. The ones that could do it were selected, and we keep on doing it. We keep on perpetuating the dissociation because of Evolution by natural selection. Anything else you add to that goes far into speculative territory. I think it’s valid speculation, but for the theory that I’m proposing to hold, all you need is evolution by natural selection. You don’t need any extra bells and whistles. You also need that consciousness is primitive, correct? I would say that consciousness is the primitive. Not personal consciousness, not your consciousness or my consciousness, but the consciousness of nature. I would say that’s the primitive. And what matter is, is what mental processes in that natural mind look like from across the dissociative boundary. Now, I am dissociated. What is my dissociative boundary? Well, it looks like my eyes, my skin, my ears, my tongue, the surface of my body and my sense organs. Um, when my dissociative alter is impinged upon by mental activity that surrounds me, I register that in the form that we call matter. Because again, evolution was such that our sense organs evolved to perceive the states of the world around us in an encoded way. This has been proven mathematically, by the way. We need to encode our sense perceptions in order to resist the second law of thermodynamics in order not to dissolve into an entropic soup. So we encode information about the outside world in the form of a sort of a dashboard. And what is that dashboard? It’s the colors we see, the sounds we hear. What you mean when you say that if we were to mirror reality exactly as it is, that we would dissolve in an entropic soup, is that Carl Friston? That’s correct. And are you essentially saying, because I haven’t read his work, are you essentially saying in the second law of thermodynamics, if you have two isolated bodies, you bring them together, then they’re going to You don’t need to go that far. The idea is mathematically extraordinarily complex. It took me a long time to persuade myself that they were onto something. But the implication for you to understand what the math is saying is very simple. Look, there are practically infinite states in the world out there, right? Infinite bits of information in the world out there. If our perception were to mirror that variety of states in the world out there, there would be too much dispersion within our body, too many states, and we would lose our dynamical and structural integrity. In other words, we would devolve into a boiling soup because it’s too much information to absorb, too many dispersed states to mirror within the boundaries of our dissociative process, which, uh, Friston calls the Markov blanket. He models our dissociative boundary according to the mathematical model that we call a Markov blanket, which is mathematically very sensible to do. So we can’t mirror the states of the world outside, otherwise we would dissolve into a boiling soup. So what can we do to gather as much information as possible about the world outside? Because it’s important to do that if we want to survive. We need, we need to know what’s going on around us. The way to do that is to encode those states in an inferential manner. You don’t mirror them all inside you. Capture what is relevant about them in a kind of internal dashboard of dials. What those dials show is not the world as it is in itself. It’s not the thing in itself. What they provide is a representation of that world. Think of it as a pilot, an airplane pilot in bad weather with clouds at night. He can’t see the world, but he trusts his instrument panel. So he needs the instrument panel in order to survive the trip. But the instrument panel is not the world. And that’s the mistake we make. Our instrument panel has a name. We call it matter, the stuff we perceive around us. And it’s important to take it seriously because otherwise you will run under a truck. Otherwise you die starving because you don’t take seriously the fact that there is food in front of you. We should take it seriously, but we have to keep in mind that that instrument panel is not the world. The pilot’s instrument panel is not the, the storm outside, it’s not the clouds, it’s not the sky, it’s not the land underneath. It is a representation of it. And we make this mistake. We take the instrument panel to be the thing in itself. And there it goes terribly wrong because it leads to impossible contradictory implications, which we can’t solve because they are just the product of wrong thinking, illogical thinking. And we label them problems and we promise that we will solve them at one point. And it has other even more pernicious implications, like the belief that your consciousness will end when you die. Well, its state will certainly change, it will not be dissociated anymore, but we have absolutely no reason to think it will end just because the image of a certain process in consciousness has changed. You don’t have any more reason to believe your consciousness will cease to be than you have to believe that if you wake up from a dream you’ll be dead. No, your dream avatar will be history, but you are not going to mourn it when you wake up. Your consciousness, your conscious state will change, but you will not cease to be as a, as a raw subject of experience. And that’s the pernicious part of this illogical road we’ve gone down for, for a couple of centuries now. Bernardo, what does it mean to explain a phenomenon? Usually, even in science and philosophy, an explanation entails a reduction. So to explain something entails reducing it to something else. Can you have an explanation without reductionism? Uh, if you redefine the sense of the word explanation, perhaps. But I think I personally wouldn’t. I like the association between explaining and reducing. And I think most things in the world around us and in ourselves can be explained. They can be reduced. The problem is that you can’t keep on explaining one thing in terms of another forever. Otherwise, you will eventually go into a circular loop and you explain exactly nothing because, you know, it’s just a loop. It’s just begging the question, as philosophers say. So at some point you hit rock bottom and there has to be something that is a given. Something in nature must not be explainable. That must be the case so that you can explain everything else. One thing, at least one thing cannot be reducible. And I think it’s consciousness. Is it possible to derive a coherent theory from starting with the premise of nothing, of zero, that somehow becomes more than zero? I’m sure you’ve gotten emails from people. I’m sure you get plenty of emails of people’s theories of consciousness and theories of everything, and I’m sure you’ve come across some that say zero is the same as infinity, from nothing comes everything, and from everything goes back to nothing. So what do you make of those? I think under an ordinary understanding of nothingness, this is possible, but I don’t think it’s possible with a thorough fundamental understanding of nothingness. I think what people who think everything came from nothing are thinking about is that there is nothing, as there is nothing manifest, but there is potentiality. So you can define the word nothing in such a way that it’s only applicable to manifestation and not to potentiality. And then you can say, well, everything came from nothing because nothing is just potential and potential is nothing. But under a more thorough definition of nothingness, I think most people would agree that the existence of a potential already means that it’s not nothing anymore. But the potential is something, or at least it’s something to be. It’s the potential for something. If you eliminate even the potentials, then I think you are squarely into incoherence land. Because there obviously is something. We are having an experience. So there is something manifest. It is possible that this something that is manifest comes out of pure potential and that at some point in natural history there was only the potential. That’s possible and coherent. But you have to stick to the potential. What does it mean to exist? I’ve heard you say that abstractions don’t exist, that numbers don’t exist, that they’re simply stories. Now, Now, here’s the way that I think about that. I can understand that, let’s say, Harry Potter, to me, the story exists. The characters don’t, but the story exists. So, first of all, what does it mean to exist? And what do you mean when you say that the abstractions themselves don’t exist? In different situations, when I’m talking to different audiences, I may articulate my words in a different way, so to appeal to the particular assumptions of that audience. When I say that abstractions don’t exist, I’m appealing to the correspondence theory of truth. Which says that mental states are only true if they correspond to no mental objective states out there in the world beyond your own mind. So based on that theory, I would say abstractions don’t exist as far as we can know, because they only exist as our own mental states. They do not have necessarily a corresponding state beyond our own mentation or beyond mentation in general. So in that sense, abstractions are just that. They are abstra— abstractions. They do not correspond to an objective state of affairs outside mind. Now, of course, the abstractions exist as such. They exist as abstractions. But most people today, they take the abstractions further. They will say, well, the abstractions exist not only as abstractions, but they correspond to something that is not itself an abstraction. And that’s where I would say, What reason do you have to believe that? Theorizing in science is useful as a predictive tool. The, the elements of our theories, like elemental subatomic particles— we have never seen a Higgs boson, for instance. We haven’t even measured one. What we measure are the results of the decay of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson exists for too short a time to interact with any measurement instrument. But we talk about the Higgs boson as if it existed. Why? Because Nature functions as though it existed. And that’s enough for you to predict nature’s behavior and develop technology. You don’t need any more than convenient fictions that prove to be predictive in practice in order to develop technology and prove the power of science, to come up with explanations, uh, forward explanations and retroactive explanations. But we cannot lose from sight that these are stories. That happen to have predictive power. Nature behaves as though the Higgs existed, as though quantum fields existed, which are pure abstractions, pure theoretical abstractions. But when we take the philosophical— this is no longer scientific step— when we take the philosophical step to say this theory is literally what nature is, and when you talk about being, about isness, now you are in metaphysics territory. Science makes no statements about what things are. Science only says how things behave. Not what they are. When you take the theory and you say nature is that, is a Higgs boson, is a quantum field, now you are taking a philosophical step which may but may not be correct, and which science in any case cannot either prove or disprove because it only makes statements about behavior. So I caution against this runaway show of abstraction that we are engaged in today. We take these useful fictions of scientific theory, which we should take very seriously because they are very useful, we take them to be literally what is. And there we can go terribly and drastically wrong. What theory of truth do you subscribe to? You said that when you’re speaking to some audiences, you conform to what their notion of truth is. And I assume that what you’re equating is what exists is that which is true, at least for this conversation. And you reference the correspondence theory of truth. Do you hold the correspondence theory of truth for your own personal view of truth? No, uh, I think— what do I hold to in my own mind, I would say all that exists is mind and everything else are the results of mind deceiving itself. Is that not correspondence? That what exists is mind, that our concept of mind corresponds to something called mind? Correspondence would be when you make a link between a mental state and a non-mental state. So that’s what the correspondence theory of truth would say. And since I don’t acknowledge the existence of any non-mental state, I think all states are mental. then rigorously speaking, I have to part with the correspondence theory of truth. But there are— we need a useful theory of truth, because otherwise we open the gates to all kinds of nonsense. If we can’t differentiate the things we normally label true from the things we normally label fiction, we open the gates to all kinds of stupidity and nonsensical conspiracy theories, which are very popular today. Do I think we have to do that? No, absolutely not. I think we should stick to a coherence theory of truth. In other words, things that fit with the data and our reasoning can be said to be true as such, to be true as things that fit with observations and reasoning. Notice that I’m not making a metaphysical inference from this. I’m not saying that these two true things exist outside mentation. I’m just saying that they are true by virtue of fitting with our reasoning and the evidence we can access. And that allows for a theory of truth that works in every instance in practice. Now, what theory of truth do I hold for myself? So I’m not talking about interaction of human beings and social life and politics and economics. Not about any of that. I’m talking about what I hold true when I put my head on my pillow alone at night in the darkness of my room. Well, with my girlfriend next to me, but when I am alone in the sense of in my own mental space. The one theory of truth I hold as fundamental is that there is only mind, not my mind. There is only mind. And everything else are the products of that mind. And within that richness of mental creation, we can classify some as true because they fit into the coherence of the edifice of reason and evidence that we’ve built. And we can say that others are untrue to you, but the others do exist as experiences. Um, a schizophrenic person does have the schizophrenic experiences. They exist as such, as experiences. They just don’t apply to the collective. So when a schizophrenic says, um, I’ve met Jesus and he touched me and blessed me, I would say, fantastic, hold on to that. It’s an experience you’ve had, and it is true as such. Nobody can take it from you. But when that person comes and says, “And because of that, I am the emissary of God on Earth and you should all follow me,” then I would say, “No, now it’s untrue because it doesn’t fit with the coherence of our edifice of reasoning and with the evidence that we have access to.” And therefore, from a collective social level, that is untrue, not by virtue that it is metaphysically other than the truth, truth, but by virtue of not fitting the scheme of things. I see, I see. So we’re all part of this one— for people who are listening, it’s called mind at large, at least that’s what you call it. We’re all part of this one mind. Do you think this mind, mind at large, can be grasped mathematically with mathematical concepts? Because when I was listening to you, what I’m thinking of is it’s easy for some people to say that they’ve skirted the hard problem of consciousness by simply positing consciousness but to me, well, that’s like saying I’ve explained the mildly positive nature of the cosmological constant by saying, well, it’s mildly positive. I just posit that as a given. And to me, I’m like, well, that doesn’t explain it. The fact that I experience green— saying, well, green is a primitive— to me doesn’t explain it. So can you help me out with that? Well, I wouldn’t even say that green is a primitive. I would say phenomenal consciousness is a primitive, and green is a particular pattern of excitation of phenomenal consciousness. In the same way that a particular pattern of ripples is an excitation of the lake. There is nothing to the ripples but the lake, and yet you can discern different patterns of ripples. You throw a stone on one side of the lake, it will look different than if you throw a car on the other side of the lake. The lake will ripple differently. There will be differentiation arising from the unity of the lake. And at no point there will be anything other than the lake. The ripples have no standalone existence. They are patterns of movement, of excitation of the lake. But within that context, we can talk of diversity, many different types of ripples, ripples of different height, different speed, different length, different shape. So I think green is a ripple. Sourness is another ripple. Falling in love is a ripple. These are different patterns of excitation of the one substrate of existence, which I think is universal phenomenal consciousness. This doesn’t deny the emergence of diversity. On the contrary, it grants that diversity exists by virtue of these multiple possible patterns of excitation of the one entity that truly exists. And I would say that all mathematics that ever been done has done none other than to describe those ripples of mind, the patterns of those ripples, the archetypal patterns according to which those ripples tend to unfold. We, you know, we have resonance theory, which is a beautifully informative theory applicable to all kinds of situations. It basically says that every object has certain modal frequencies of excitation, frequencies in which it preferably oscillates. Like if you put somebody in a swing and you push that person, if you push that person faster than the swing wants to go, the person would stop moving because there will be destructive interference. But if you push that person in the exact same frequency that the swing wants to move, it will build up and there will be resonance. And builders in Japan protect themselves against earthquakes precisely by trying to not be in that harmonic of the the earthquake, otherwise it will resonate with the earthquake and it will crumble. I think what mathematics is showing us is that mind itself has some harmonics. It has some preferred frequencies in which it tends to oscillate better than in other frequencies. Jungian psychologists would call it the archetypes of the collective unconscious, the templates of behavior and feeling that tend to manifest more frequently. And mathematics models that. Everything mathematics has ever done was to model the patterns of excitation of mind. It has never done anything else. So if you’re asking me, ask me, can it do that? I would say obviously it can, because it has never done anything other than this. Okay, so what I was saying is that these Jungian archetypes, they don’t seem to be modeled mathematically. They seem amorphous and ill-defined. But yet you’re saying undergirding existence are these ripples of consciousness. Now ripples are obviously easily modeled mathematically. So I’m assuming you’re using ripples as a metaphor. Of course. Then is there hope to model Jung’s archetypes mathematically? Again, I think we’ve never done anything differently, but let me preface this with a disclaimer. I’m not saying that mathematics can only model human psychology. Of course not. It can model the world. It has been spectacularly successful at modeling black holes and predicting the behavior of black holes. It has been spectacularly successful at modeling the microscopic world of quantum physics. So obviously mathematics models the world out there, which is precisely the mystery. Physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a paper in 1960 titled “The Mysterious Effectiveness of Mathematics to Model the Natural World.” He uses the word miracle 12 times in that paper. Because for him it’s a miracle that our logic, our mathematical tenets are so incredibly accurate at modeling the world outside our own personal minds. Why should that be the case? There is no good reason why that should be the case. And Wigner was in wonder that mathematics could do that, that somebody in the, in the solemn isolation of his armchair could think up equations that turn out to predict quasars and black holes and quantum phenomena. It’s incredible. Why is that the case? Um, just to complete this, I would say that it is the case because both our minds, our personal minds, and nature at large, they both rest on the same thing, on the same natural mind. Uh, the, the inanimate universe we study and describe with math is just the appearance, the image, the representation of transpersonal mental processes out there, which also comport themselves in preferred ways, in archetypal ways, if you want to extrapolate the Jungian definition. So at, at the ultimate sense, I would equate nature with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. But by doing this, I’m not saying that mathematics is not applicable to quasars and black holes. I’m saying that quasars and black holes are themselves the expression, the image, the way transpersonal archetypal mental processes appear when observed from our perspective. So defining archetypes this broadly, you may think it’s a trick, it’s a bit of a trick, but if I define archetypes this broadly, then I would say mathematics models the archetypes because it’s modeling the patterns and regularities of nature. When you do not have regularity, then you have randomness, and that’s not modeled by, well, Well, it actually is modeled by mathematics, but not in a precise way. Uh, you can measure certain overall properties of randomness, but not the particular instances of every aspect of a random process. So mathematics, of course, only models regularities. And I would say that all regularities, both in our personal minds and nature at large, um, are regular by virtue of being the expressions of these fundamental harmonics. Of this one mind underlying all existence, the archetypal manifestations of this one mind. It’s by virtue of being archetypal that they are regular. Otherwise, there would be no regularity if there were no favorite modes of excitation, no preferred modes of behavior, no resonant frequencies, no harmonics, if you will. If there weren’t any of these, there would be nothing for mathematics to model because nothing would be regular. It would be just random noise. Obviously, it’s not. So what’s mathematics measuring? By my own definition, it’s modeling the archetypes of all nature, the inner archetypes and the outer archetypes. They are one and the same thing. Is it possible that there exists this random noise that’s not patterned? And it’s just that because it’s chaotic, we don’t even perceive it. It’s not within our realm. You know, there are many things we thought in our earlier scientific history that were random. And now we know that they are not random at all. It’s just that the causal chains involved are so complex that we can’t keep track of them. So when we throw a coin, we know that there’s nothing random about that. It’s about the airflow. It’s about the weight distribution and the center of mass of the coin. It’s about the particular angular and linear momentum that you imparted on a coin when you threw it. But it’s impossible to keep track of all that. So we say, well, the coin throw is random. Well, it’s not fundamentally random. It’s epistemically random in the sense that we can’t keep track of it, but it’s there. Now, I would say that that every single time we figured out that what we thought was fundamentally random was just epistemically random. There is one exception today, and that’s the particular outcome of one quantum process. We know that when we take a set of quantum events together, that set is predictable. It has some statistical characteristics that are predictable. But a single quantum event is completely and fundamentally unpredictable today. Now, I would dare to say that this again is an instance of epistemic randomness, not fundamental randomness. It’s just that we don’t have the theoretical apparatus in place to convince ourselves that it’s just that we can’t keep track of what’s going on, so we think it’s random. But I don’t think it is fundamentally random. I don’t think randomness exists fundamentally. I think the very concept of change is an appeal to epistemic limitations. In other words, when we don’t know what causes it, we say it’s by chance. But it’s not by chance at all. It’s just that we don’t know. Know what the causal chain behind that was. And it may be that there are patterns and regularities in nature that exceed causality, that don’t fit into our current definition of causality. So you could say that certain things are acausal, but not that they are random. It’s just that they are obeying patterns and regularities of a different nature than the linearity of causal chains. There may be resonant patterns of vibration, sympathetic, uh, influences in nature, things that look alike that tend to happen together, even though they are not connected by a causal chain of events, what Jung called synchronicity. So I’m open to the idea that there is more to the patterns and irregularities of nature than the processes that fit into what we would call causality. But that is only because our definition of causality is limited, which gives value to the word. If we make this definition too broad, then the word means nothing. But what we call causality may not be the whole story. But I think whatever is the whole story, it’s an expression of the patterns and regularities inherent in nature, and therefore inherent in the mind of nature and in our own minds. And that’s why Wigner’s miracle is not a miracle at all. That’s why mathematics can describe the world. Both are rooted in one and the same mind, obeying the one and same— the same archetypes. Before we went live, we were talking about how I had some experience with, let’s say, some greater reality, maybe or not. It may be, and it, it provoked extreme anxiety in me. And then you told me, well, Kurt, I mean, that what I thought could be true, but it also could not be, and the mind is exceedingly deceptive. So what I’m wondering is, so is mind deceptive, or is it just our narratives about the sensory data that becomes distorted? Deceptive? Or is mind at large somehow constitutionally deceptive? And if so, then how do we sort out what is true from what’s not? What do we use as a barometer to guide our life? Is it divine revelation? Well, you already said, well, we have to do away with that. The thing is, most of the world we think we live in arises from our inner narratives, from our inner storytelling, We don’t see the world impartially at all. We tile it with narratives, with what we tell ourselves is going on. And I think the deception that is the prime directive of mind is in weaving these narratives. It’s not deceptive when it comes to what it is in itself, because it’s what it is. It cannot deceive itself other than by telling itself a wrong story about what it is, but it cannot be deceiving itself in the sense of being something other than what it is. It is what it is, and that’s what it is. There is no escape from that. So in that sense, there is no deception. Whatever is, is, has always been, and will always be. The problem is that we— Sorry, here’s one way that you can recover that it is what it is and also that it is necessarily distorted. Because let’s imagine consciousness is a circle. I know this is foolish, but let’s imagine it’s a circle and then it has ripples that come out. Somehow, maybe there’s another law on top of this that when the ripples come back to you, that chain is somehow not what it was when it left. So you could all— you could recover that it’s necessarily— that it’s necessarily deceptive. And I think there’s much of the Buddhist traditions that say something like this. Now you will know much more So there you go. I’m throwing that out. Let’s hear what you say. I’m not an expert in Eastern philosophy at all, actually. Look, there are certain coherence constraints that can base a useful, practical theory of truth. But those coherence constraints necessarily arise out of some collective engagement. So we can say that given our stories, our collective stories about what is reasonable and what is evidentiary, We can eliminate certain things as untrue. And I think that’s entirely valid. Not only valid, it’s crucially necessary for social life. Otherwise, it would be completely dysfunctional. But I think at the bottom of it all, there is just mind being mind and then telling itself narratives about what it is. And that’s where the deception occurs. It is in the narrative. It seems like it’s unadaptive, or unless it is adaptive, like you’re saying. It’s highly adaptive. It’s incredibly adaptive. You could say that without these narratives, nothing would be real. It is the process of self-deception that creates any sense of objectivity and concreteness and reality. Without those narratives, you’re always resting in that awareness that whatever is arising is just you making it up. Up. You see, the one mind in nature is making it all up. For it to have a sense of reality, in other words, and that’s our intuition about what’s real, is that which exists regardless of whether you believe it or not. That’s our intuition about what’s real. For that sense to exist, you have to have some kind of narrative that creates boundaries in nature, that creates that which I am not and which unfolds independently of what I think, believe, or prefer. If you don’t have that, there is no reality. There is no sense of reality. There is only the one mind knowing that it is the only thing going on and that whatever arises, it’s thinking it up, which probably is the ultimate reality. But it’s not a comforting reality, is it? I call it the— when you glimpse that, I call it— the English word escapes me— the vertigo of eternity. Which is better described as the vertigo of timelessness, because it is vertigo. Is that akin to the void that some people— It’s Nietzsche’s void. Yeah. Yeah. When you look long enough into it, it stares back at you. It’s what— What does that staring back at you mean? I understand that you can have the experience of the void. What do you mean when you say that the void stares back at you? I know you’re quoting Nietzsche, but what does it mean in your model? I’ll tell you what I think Nietzsche meant. Okay. What Nietzsche meant is that if you stare enough into the void of your own mentation, it seems to acquire a life of its own and become a separate agency. And as such, it stares back at you. It sort of splits off from yourself and acquires objective reality. Jung insisted that the archetypes were the objective psyche. And so it appeals to this sense of separation, of this sense of boundary creation that creates what you are and what you are not, that which is inside and that’s what is outside, that which is the self and that which is not the self, the subject and the object. And reality depends on this separation. Our sense of what is real depends on it because we intuit reality as that which does not depend on us. I think ultimately there is no such a thing. There is no such reality. The real reality is that it’s mind making it all up, not randomly, but by giving expression to its own favorite patterns of excitation, its own harmonics, because that’s what it can do by virtue of being what it is. And then we place the narratives on that. And that narrative creates the, quote, “reality” of subject and object, which is extremely useful. The richness of experience would be much less if this were not the case. It is sense of separation, illusory as it may be, that creates the richness of existence, that creates the human drama. It creates drama. Is this mind at large akin to what in other religions they call God? And can you pray to it? Does it intervene? I don’t think, um, we have good reasons to think of the mind underlying the rest of nature. In other words, the mind that’s not my mind, your mind, the mind of my cat, uh, the mind that is not in any living being. In other words, the non-dissociated segments of, of universal mind. Um, I think we do not have good reasons to think of this non-dissociated segment, which I what I call mind at large, we don’t have good reasons to think of it as self-reflective, as capable of metacognition, capable of having the thought, “Oh, I am having this thought.” I think it’s more akin to my cat. It has experiences, but it doesn’t think of its experiences as such. It’s not self-reflective. It’s not metacognitive. So from that perspective, I don’t think the unfolding of nature is the result of a premeditation a premeditated plan drawn in the very beginning of time and now carefully unfolding under supervision. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I am a naturalist. I think nature is unfolding the way it is because it is what it is. It can’t be any different. I think interpreting it as mental, which I think is what’s actually going on, only informs us that this unfolding is instinctive rather than premeditated. So I wouldn’t pray to it as if it were a thinking human being in the sky with a plan and making explicit and thought-through decisions about the fate of every human being. I think that’s not how stuff is happening. That’s not what’s going on. I think it’s unfolding. Via its natural archetypes, its preferred ways of unfolding. That said, setting an intention, I think, can influence the world for the exact same reasons that moving your arms can influence the world. Our mental activity leaves a footprint in the world. By having been here, our environment is what it is or wouldn’t have been if we were not here. I mean, To speak in physical terms, in other words, in the language of representations and images, we occupy a volume in space. If I were to suddenly disappear, air would rush into that volume of space and probably create a sonic boom. I don’t know. It would make a thundering noise because that’s exactly what thunder is. It’s air filling in the vacuum of overheated air left by lightning. So our very presence in the world changes the world. And I think this is very obvious when it comes to our physical influence. Influence in the world by building a house with our hands, by moving around. But I think the same type of influence is plausible when it comes to the deepest layers of our mind, which may not be as dissociated as our ego is. In other words, it may have more commerce with the mentation around us. So if you set a deep intention through prayer, I do think it is plausible that you may get an effect, but not for the reasons you may think you may get an effect. So it works as if, but the mechanism is not exactly— Exactly. Then, yeah. So where does morality fit into this? Our narrative may be naive, but may be effective in the sense that things work as if it were true. Where does morality fit into this? And purpose? I think purpose can be teleological. In other words, purpose, what we call purpose, may reflect fundamental archetypes in nature. So it could be a natural archetype. Let me phrase it in a different way. Self-knowledge, I suspect, is a natural archetype. In other words, there is an intrinsic drive in mind, including mind at large, towards self-knowledge. I think it’s incredibly plausible that this is the case because it seems to be the case for every single living being. There is a drive to know about ourselves. What are we? We have this need to identify a place in this grand scheme of things for what we are. We care deeply about it. And raising our self-awareness has all kinds of positive effects. So I do think self-knowledge as purpose has a teleological root. It reflects a fundamental archetype of nature. It exists because nature is what it is. By being what what it is, it wants to know itself merely by virtue of being what it is. Now, uh, morals are a different story. I think morals are very important to guide our social lives, to make our social lives function. If in a complete moral vacuum, we would be completely dysfunctional. There would be no basis for cooperation. We’d be killing each other, raping each other, and there would be only chaos and destruction, and we would go nowhere. Now, none of us wants that. If you look deeply into yourself, you see that even if you think you want that, no, you’re just rebelling against something else, or you’re angry with yourself. But deep, deep, deep inside, we all want some form of functionality. We want to go somewhere. We want to evolve in some sense, learn or find out something or express something. Uh, and morals are important for that, but I don’t think they are archetypal. I think morals are a product of an age and a culture. In a sense, they are an invention. We create them, but we create them for very good reasons, very practical reasons, to make our social life functional. But I don’t think they reflect something fundamental in nature. I think they are human creations, important ones. And just so you and also people watching understand, I’m not an idealist, I’m not a materialist. I, I don’t know what I am. I just say I’m a somewhat foolish filmmaker a maker floating in a void, unmoored and looking for anchorage. So when I ask you this question— yeah, well, it’s also destabilizing at the same time. Okay, when I hear that you say, well, we all want the same thing, and I don’t think history shows that. I think that you may say, well, unconsciously, in our deep, deepest drives, we all want the same thing, but that’s somewhat unfalsifiable because then if someone says and acts as if they like to order. And they like, like Genghis Khan said, to put the head of his enemy on a stick and rape the enemy’s tribes. That’s my idea of morality, something like that. No, that’s not what I meant. Yeah, okay. Just briefly to clarify, what I meant is that deep inside we want, we all want some form of order. But the form of order that you may want may differ from mine, and we may go to war about it. But none of us wants complete anarchic chaos. Hitler didn’t want it. Genghis Khan didn’t want wanted. Nobody ever wanted complete chaos. They just had different notions about the order they did want. So what I meant is we all want some form of order, different forms, but we all want some form of order. None of us wants total and complete chaos. Yeah, to me that’s another way of stating that we all want something, because then to say it’s a thing means that it’s discernible, which means it has a boundary, which means there’s some order to it. But then I don’t know if that’s saying much, because it’s like saying we want something. It could be anything, and yes, it can conflict, but you do agree that you want something. Yes, we can both agree we do want something. It doesn’t say much, Curt, but it does explain the emergence of morals. It’s enough to explain why morals arise at all. I see what you’re saying. Because we want some order, and the reflection of that want is what we enshrine in a moral code. Okay, okay. So I can see how moral false could have developed evolutionarily and that they can conflict. What I was wondering is if there’s a divine order or if there’s some objective morality. You seem to say, well, maybe not, but if we want to function together, then that’s akin to a dance and we call that dance morality. Well, there is certainly a divine order, because if there weren’t, there would have been no successful science. There is— there are patterns of regularity in nature that we can capture with mathematics and which help us to predict things with extraordinary precision. So there is natural order, absolutely. I think this is archetypal order. It is what it is because nature is what it is. But moral order is a specific type of order that seems to govern behavior. Now, I have not ever been able to identify an archetypal moral order in nature. Killer whales, orcas, they fool around with sea lions before eating them. So torture for the sake of play. Chimpanzees can organize gangs to murder other chimpanzees in their own tribe. Nature is a bloodbath. Your backyard is a bloodbath. Ants cutting earthworms in pieces while they are still alive. I mean, do you see a moral code embedded in nature? I don’t. I see order in nature, but it’s not of a moral quality. It’s much more fundamental than that. It’s a much lower floor of the building. It’s much closer to the foundations. And I wouldn’t attribute the word morality to that in any sense that the word is used in conversation. I think morality, what we mean by it, is something that we create ourselves in order to facilitate social cooperation for the achievement of our preferred form of order. Now, different people may have different preferred forms of order. That’s That’s why different cultures at different times have different moral codes, because they need to organize their behavior along different lines in order to achieve their particular sense of the order that is desired. There is always some desired order enshrined in a given moral code, but that order and the moral code differ across time and space. So I don’t see them as fundamental. I see them as practical, pragmatic, very useful, very important, important human creations. Nature itself has order, but it’s not moral. It’s a much more raw form of order, much more fundamental. Bernardo, I don’t know about you, but I gain a lot of insight from watching intellectuals talk about one another, comparing, contrasting. It’s almost like a battle of the gods. So I would like you to comment. I have quite a few intellectuals written down: Joshua Bach, Dennett, Jordan Peterson, Daniel Hofstadter, Hoffman, Ray Kurzweil even. So let’s just stick with Joschua Bach for now. How do you view his theory of consciousness? Where do you see him being mistaken or misguided? Um, I’m not sure. The name is familiar. Um, I have heard the name, but I don’t really know much. Okay, well, he would say, like, and I’m paraphrasing, that computers can be conscious because all that consciousness is is a simulation. So consciousness, it’s— we have it backwards. We don’t have that you can’t simulate consciousness. We have that only a simulation can be conscious. And what consciousness is, is the computer or whatever computational infrastructure underlies this universe. In his model, it’s computation, like Wolfram would say, it’s computation at its core. Whatever it is, it’s then making models and telling stories. And what we experience as consciousness is this machine telling a story, simulating what would it be like if so-and-so happened. What happened? Look, I’ll criticize what you described. I don’t know whether it has been accurate or complete, so I cannot pass judgment. Giving an asinine description. The name Joshua Baugh is familiar. There was a guy who sort of trolled me a few years ago on my website. Probably not the same guy, but the name is familiar. I would say the following. Look, I have a friend who calls this kind of position the Pinocchio theories of consciousness, like consciousness is Pinocchio’s nose. I think this is at the same level as saying that consciousness is the involuntary wiggling of my left big toe. It’s completely arbitrary because it doesn’t link the word back to what we know it to be. Consciousness is experience. So to say that consciousness is a simulation is just as arbitrary as to say that consciousness is the wiggling of my pinky. Now, say whatever you want, but it doesn’t have any meaning. It’s a syntactically well-formed statement that is completely devoid of semantic foundation. Look, because we’ve made some fatal errors in our thinking— we take images to be the thing in itself and we replace reality with descriptions— we are forced into reductions to absurdity, reductio ad absurdum. But we don’t want to acknowledge that we’ve reduced our thinking to an absurdity, so we label it a problem. And then we give ourselves the freedom to completely abandon our sense of plausibility when it comes to consciousness, a sense of plausibility we take very seriously in every other situation. For instance, I can simulate kidney function on my computer accurately down to the molecular level, but that doesn’t mean that my computer will pee on my desk, because we know that the simulation of the phenomenon, doesn’t matter how accurate, is not the phenomenon. But people who think we can create sentient computers, they think that by simulating the particular patterns of information flow in the human brain, they can create a machine that is conscious. Well, that’s entirely strictly equivalent to saying that a computer simulation of kidney function can pee on one’s desk. It’s absurd. It’s very, very sophisticated, stupidity. And we don’t see that because we backed ourselves into a corner of absurdity by making those initially wrong postulates about the nature of reality: mistaking representation for the thing in itself and mistaking a description for reality. So, since we are in absurd territory already anyway and we don’t want to admit it, we give ourselves then the freedom to conjure up these Ridiculously silly stories that are peddled by Ray Kurzweil, for instance. These are the Pinocchio theories of consciousness. I think mine is better. Consciousness is the wiggling of my left big toe. Okay, so let’s, let’s not strawman any of the people who believe in the illusory nature of consciousness. I, for one, haven’t heard or grasped a coherent theory that says that consciousness is an illusion. And so for me, when someone says, well, do you believe consciousness is an illusion? I can’t say no, nor can I say yes, because I imagine that if I was to articulate it back to Daniel Dennett, let’s say, that he would say, that’s not what I believe at all. So if you don’t mind helping me out and explaining what do people mean when they say, like Daniel Dennett in particular, because I’m sure there are variants of this. So let’s pick Dennett. What do you, what does he mean when he says consciousness is an illusion and separate yourself from that? This is rich territory. So, let me try to get my bearings here to operate fairly in these waters. You could say that when people claim that consciousness is an illusion, what they mean is that consciousness is not what it seems to be. That is coherent, but it does not solve the hard problem of consciousness, because the hard problem of consciousness is not what we think consciousness is, It’s about the fact that there is experience at all. So by saying that consciousness is not what it seems to be doesn’t solve the hard problem, because even if it is something else, the fact that you think about it, the fact that you experience something, is already an instance of that thing that you can’t explain. So the proponents of the consciousness as an illusion theory, they are either either incoherent or they are irrelevant. Because if you say consciousness is an illusion because it is not what it seems to be, well, you are coherent, but you’re not solving the hard problem. Actually, you’re not doing anything. At best, you’re making a statement related to cognitive psychology. We think wrongly about a whole number of things. We think we see the entire visual field in high resolution, while in fact we only see the very center of the visual field in high resolution. And because we are always moving our eyes, scanning the visual field, we create this illusion in high res. Well, there is that illusion. Could we be wrong in our explanations about what consciousness actually entails? Well, we very well could be wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter because if there is any experience, regardless of the story we tell about it, if there is any experience at all, then we have the hard problem. So they are either incoherent, absurdly incoherent, because, you know, to say that consciousness is an illusion in the sense that it doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist is directly incoherent because it’s the only instance of an illusion in which the illusion itself is already an instance of that which you’re trying to say doesn’t exist. Because if you’re deluded or illuded about something, that very illusion is an experience. An illusion happens in consciousness. So if you’re trying to say that consciousness doesn’t exist because it’s an illusion, You’re flagrantly incoherent. And if you’re trying to say that it’s an illusion because it doesn’t seem what it seems, it is not what it seems to be, then fine, you’re not incoherent, but you’re irrelevant. You’re not contributing at all to the problem. And now if you press Dennett on that, and this is not even an opinion, it’s well known, he is slippery. He will never give you a final answer. So what do you think his motivation is for that? Do you think it’s nefarious or that he’s just simply misunderstanding something? No, I don’t— neither. I don’t think he is nefarious. I think he truly believes what he’s saying. And what he believes is that we are missing something important that would just make the hard problem disappear. And he’s trying to suggest a direction where to look for that something. But he hasn’t found it. And he’s the first to admit that he hasn’t quite pinned it down. He’s just suggesting a direction. Well, I would argue to you that he’s walking in a hall of mirrors. That’s something he’s looking for. It doesn’t exist. It’s not there. But because he doesn’t want to part with a certain worldview. He wants to keep space open for it, to keep the possibility open that one day we may find it. This is not nefarious. It’s just human. It’s human foolishness and human commitment to the stories with which we identify ourselves publicly. It’s very hard when you are publicly identified with a narrative, it’s very hard to 30 years later later, when your life has been lived already, to say, well, I was a fool and that was wrong, because then you’re telling your own ego, I wasted my life, and no ego wants that. And there are all kinds of psychological subterfuges, ego defense mechanisms is the technical name, in which you will trick yourself into not confronting that and keeping the possibility open for that which you committed your entire life to. And that’s That’s why true revolutions only happen in the hands of younger people who are not already committed and who are truly more open-minded and are not plagued by this autonomous psychological mechanisms that take our eyes off the ball. So do you believe Richard Dawkins when he says, well, one of the best stories of my life was when someone pointed out to me why I was wrong, or pointed out to his professor, and then that professor who had worked on that particular theory for 15 years said, Thank you, I appreciate you telling me that I was wrong and now I can abandon that. And he was saying that as a virtue. So do you think that Richard Dawkins and people like him who are materialists are in a sense virtue signaling about their willingness to abandon their preconceived notions even if it’s been around for 20 years? You see it as like, no, no, no, you should abandon this preconceived notion that goes back 200 years. I think when it comes to what I would call small theories, things that we are not fully invested in, if somebody proves us wrong, it’s truly welcome. It happens all the time in science. But I think when you have committed your own self to a certain perspective and you have invested your life and career in it and you’re recognized as the very face of that position, I don’t think anybody, not even me, would be truly happy to be proven wrong. I think it’s an egoic catastrophe. It’s something that will land you in a therapist’s room in no time if you’re open-minded, and will lead you to drugs and suicide if you’re not. So I, I think that that’s the self-image Dawkins has. It’s what he wants to believe about himself. But if the theory in question is not a small theory but the metaphysical theory of materialism, then I don’t think I don’t think he’s being honest to himself. He may be honest in the sense that this is what he actually thinks about himself, but I think he’s deluded, as most of us are, about our own inner psychological dynamics. So he’s pretending to be infinitely malleable, but he’s saying, well, you can trim the edges, but don’t cut me off at the roots. Yeah. I don’t think he’s being malicious about this. I think he himself believes this about himself. So he’s not being dishonest in a malicious way, but I think he may be deceiving himself if this is indeed what he said. Yeah, I see. Okay, let’s talk about Douglas Hofstadter, who has a brilliant, brilliant book. I think it’s both mine and yours favorite books, or at least one of them. And there are only a few books that I keep close to me. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Yeah. And then there’s one more that you should check out called Metamagical Themas as well. This one I haven’t read yet. Yeah, it’s— they’re full of essays that are, that are more digestible than Gödel, Escher, Bach. So what’s Douglas Hofstadter’s view on consciousness? How does it arise in his view? And then why do you think that’s incorrect? What are the problems with it? Okay, look, let me first sing some praises to Douglas Hofstadter. That book by him, Gödel, Escher, Bach, is a monumental achievement of human intellect. It’s a book to be literally in awe of. And he wrote that apparently most of it when he when he was like 27. Yeah, but that’s usually the case. Yeah. When we are at our peak, which happens very early on, we peak very early when it comes to that kind of intellectual work. And we peak very late when it comes to wisdom. And that’s a distinction you have to keep in mind. Wisdom peaks late. Intellect peaks early. And that’s a monumental intellectual achievement. The different threads he has managed to weave in there, which is reflected in the title, are fantastic. And it’s very seducing, his story. And then, okay, to try to summarize that book in a conversation is nearly impossible. Well, it’s effectively impossible. So what I’m about to say will be an injustice, but we need something to guide our conversation. So I’ll summarize it unfairly in the following way. He uses the idea of strange loops. That’s the name he uses, strange loops. And what basically These are self-referential loops, things that refer to themselves. And you see that in Gödel’s proof of his incompleteness theorem. You see that in the canons of Bach compositions. And you see that in the paintings of Escher, the Dutch draw artist, drawing artist more than a painter, in which things sort of self-refer. There are these strange loops of self-reference. which are very difficult to wrap one’s mind around because of the self-reference. Self-reference is very difficult to fit into an intellectual drawer because it seems to be a hydra. Whenever you think you got it under control, other heads pop elsewhere and sort of catch you from behind because of these self-referential loops. And he constructs this— he helps you build this intuition about the strangeness of self-referential loops in a majestic way. He’s a true master of conveying that intuition. And I think the book is monumental all the way close to the end, because then his last move is like a fall from the precipice. It’s like he climbs the world’s tallest intellectual mountain just to throw himself into the abyss at the very end. Instead of standing in there and cheering, he just throws himself into the dark abyss, because the idea he tries to convince you of is that Somehow, because of all the weirdness of these self-referential loops, somehow that relates to the origin of consciousness. And this is an appeal to complexity to hide an impossible intellectual position. Does he just say it’s somehow connected, or does he give more of a connection than that? I would say he claims to give a more direct account. I don’t see that direct account. I see an arbitrary jump from the acknowledgment of something very strange, uh, to something related to consciousness, which is not even consciousness, because what he’s appealing to when he tries to explain consciousness is not phenomenal consciousness. He’s appealing to self-reflection. Self-reflection is one particular configuration of consciousness, one particular modality of consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is the problem here. Once you have phenomenal consciousness, you certainly can account for the emergence of self-reflection out of a mind that already experiences. And I would grant to you, he succeeds in that in a highly poetic and intellectually sophisticated way. He succeeds in explaining the rise of self-reflection, but he doesn’t succeed in explaining that rise from non-consciousness. He explains that rise by assuming that there is already phenomenality to begin with. Okay. So if I understand this correctly, you see him as explaining self-consciousness given consciousness, but he doesn’t explain consciousness itself. Yes. But he may use the word consciousness in the sense of self-reflection or self-consciousness or meta-consciousness. Right. He’s conflating. He’s conflating. And that happens a lot in neuroscience. That happens in psychology. Uh, it happens a lot. It’s widespread. Philosophers have tried to help and, you know, make sure that these words have coherent meanings and distinctive meanings, but people make a mess. But let, let Let me bring to your attention again that the problem is not self-reflection or self-consciousness. The problem is that there is experience at all, that qualities can emerge from quantities, from mere numbers and abstractions. That is the problem. Now, how something that already experiences can then develop the ability to cognize its own experiences explicitly, in other words, to tell itself, “Oh, I am having this experience now,” that’s a trivial problem, or relatively trivial. It’s a problem for cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology. It’s not a problem of a metaphysical nature. And the whole path that is followed in that book has to do with self-reflection. But it doesn’t explain phenomenal consciousness at all. Hofstadter is not the only one to make this conflation. It’s all over the place. So I think he doesn’t explain phenomenal consciousness at all. And to talk about, um, um, Ray Kurzweil again, in his 2005 book, um, The Singularity is Near, he appeals to pure complexity to explain consciousness, which is similar to the strangeness of the loops that Hofstadter appeals to. And what you see consistent behind all these different attempts to reconcile consciousness with materialism is an appeal to complexity, an appeal to to an unknown. And to lay bare what I think is going on there to you, it’s like saying that if we add enough legs to a centipede, it will eventually fly. Because at some point there will be so many legs, so many you can’t even visualize, you can’t picture it, it’s so many legs, it’s so complex, so amazing, it will fly. Well, no, it will not. Because adding legs does nothing to the ability of flying. So it doesn’t matter how many legs you add, it has nothing to do with flight. So when it comes to consciousness, materialists acknowledge that a few neurons talking to one another is not conscious because now we can measure all the parameters that are of relevance and they are all quantitative. So there is no reason to think that that would create qualities, right? There is nothing about a series of neurons sending electrochemical impulses to one another that contains the redness of red, or let me say the greenness of green, because the neurons are not themselves green and electrochemical impulses are not green. So greenness doesn’t arise from that. We all know that. But we say, but if you just put enough neurons talking to each other in such a complex way that you can’t even think about it, you can’t even visualize it, then greenness emerges. No, it doesn’t, for the same reason that the centipede with more legs doesn’t fly. Or even appeal to another Well, my issue would be maybe it does in some way, but you haven’t explained it at all. You’ve just said it’s complex, therefore the quality of— You said nothing. But you see, this is what keeping materialism alive. It’s not its explanatory power. It can’t explain experience, and therefore it can be said that it doesn’t explain anything because everything we know, we know by virtue of experiencing it in some way. But it’s being kept alive by trying to keep its plausibility open. In other words, the effort is in not admitting that it’s dead. The effort is in saying, “Well, we can’t explain it now, but we may explain it in the future,” in some incredibly tortuous lines of arguments that actually don’t touch on any of the important issues, but sort of create a smokescreen. So the survival of materialism now, the efforts in that direction are focused on creating these intellectual smokescreens. And they are just that, they are smokescreens, incoherent appeals to the unknown, incoherent appeals to complexity to try to keep that story alive, right? Um, then the tricky part is that it’s not unjustified, because before there was plenty that we thought was magic and we couldn’t explain, and then slowly materialism has explained that, explained that, explained that. So now they think, well, consciousness is just one of those that we deem to be magical somehow, or at least the spiritual types, or at least they view the spiritual types as deeming it as— that’s another conflation. Materialism has never explained anything at all. What has explained things is science. And science is not a metaphysical commitment. Science is metaphysically neutral. The problem is that so many scientists conflate the two that we created this cultural fable that science is inherently materialist. Science is not. Science allows us to predict the behavior of nature. So if our predictive models work, in the sense that we predict that nature will do this if this and this happens, and then nature goes ahead and does exactly that, okay, science works. And we can develop technology technology on the basis of that predictive power. But none of it depends on an understanding, a correct understanding of what nature is. Whatever nature is, it’s behaving the way it’s behaving. Its behavior is not in dispute. It does what it does. We can predict it. We can model it. We can write equations about it. We can prove the effectiveness of those equations through experiment. And none of of that says an iota about what nature is. The metaphysical question is the question of materialism. Materialism says nature is essentially non-mental. Nature is essentially quantitative, independent of mind, right? Yeah, but that’s not science. Science uses the quantities to build predictive models, not to say that nature is quantitative. Science doesn’t make this statement, doesn’t need to make this statement. So I would say materialism never explained anything. All what it did was to carve out, in the 17th century, to carve out a space for science different from the space that scientists had to grant to the Church. The soul of man belonged to the Church, and if scientists tried to wander into that territory, they would be burned at the stake. So there was a very, very good reason to leave mental space alone to the Church. Because you see, the word for mentality in Greek is psyche, which is the same word for So, soul, mentality, consciousness, back in the 17th century, they were one and the same thing. So scientists needed to differentiate from that, to carve out a space where they could work without being burned alive. The invention of materialism served that purpose. It was not an explanatory thing. Well, you could say it was handy in the sense that it allowed the scientist to separate himself from the subject of study. By thinking of his own mind as encapsulated in matter, his beliefs about the outcome of experiments wouldn’t impinge on the experiment. So whatever he believed didn’t matter, only the result of the experiment. So it had a psychological role to play that helped scientists become more neutral, more impartial. I would grant that. It had a sociopolitical role to play to allow scientists to carve out a space for themselves without the risk of being burned alive. Life, but it has never, never had an iota of an explanatory role. It can’t have, because all that we know to happen, we know by virtue of experiencing it. And materialism does not explain experience. It explains exactly nothing. It has been a socially and psychologically useful fairy tale, but one we have grown out of. We are better than this, we are better than to hide behind complexity to hold hold on to an untenable intellectual story that has reduced itself to absurdity. But we don’t admit it. We call it the hard problem of consciousness. And in order to safeguard our own self-image and the commitments we’ve made publicly to a certain narrative. And it’s a shame that it’s playing out this way. Have you heard of Dennett’s quining qualia? I have heard of it. I have read some about it, but I don’t consider knowledgeable enough of the subject to criticize or comment intelligently. Essentially, what he’s doing is dismissing that we have qualia at all. That’s probably the case for a particular, very restrictive definition of qualia that Dennett holds in his own mind. He’s not the only one to do that. There are others, there are his little followers that hold to the same point of view. But if you engage with them and you try to really make explicit what all the assumptions are, all the term definitions, what they’re actually saying, you will notice that what they mean by qualia is not pure, raw experience. It’s a theoretical construct. Abstract. To, to say that qualia don’t exist is the most self-evidently absurd statement conceivable to human thought, because it’s to deny that there has ever been an experience that you have ever had. Now, if you confront the Dennett side of things— I debated one online via Twitter several times last Keith Frankish is his name. We even had an exchange of essays on the IAI, the Institute of Art and Ideas. We had a very public and contentious debate. You see that they don’t deny the rawness of experience because they would basically be committing themselves to the lunatic asylum if they did that. And they are not that stupid. They are not stupid. They are intelligent enough to weave a complex enough intellectual web that they themselves get stuck in it and cannot find their way out. And that’s the dark side of high intelligence. You can weave with high sophistication a web that is so complex, so sophisticated, that you yourself get caught in it and you are unable to find your way out. The simplicity of the problem eludes you. Excludes them. The simplicity of the meaning of the word qualia, for most of us that are not caught in Torches’ intellectual abstractions, is too simple for them to even discern, for them to see the simplicity of that. And that is raw, simple experience. If you’re hungry, that’s qualia. You see a red apple, that’s qualia. You think about your immortal soul, that’s qualia. Whatever is not qualia is fundamentally beyond your ability to know. Even your abstraction Abstractions are a form of qualia as such, as abstractions in your mind. You cannot escape that. So by proving that something else that they mean by the word qualia doesn’t exist, they are either incoherent or they are irrelevant, because either they mean by qualia what you and I mean, and then it’s absurd what they are saying. Obviously qualia exists. Or they mean something else, strictly defined in a highly sophisticated and tortuous, uh, philosophical manner. And that thing that they define indeed doesn’t exist, but it’s completely irrelevant because it doesn’t have any bearing on the hard problem. Bernard, I gotta use the washroom super quick. Sure. If you don’t, then do you mind quickly explaining to the audience, because they’re probably thinking about this, why is it that if this is all dependent on the mind, then why is it that there seems to be object permanence? So you leave the room, the object still— okay, you can explain that. Thank you. Yeah, so when we say as an idealist, and we say that the whole world is a mind, we don’t mean that it is only in your mind or in my mind alone. We grant that there is a world outside our personal or individual minds, separated from us by a dissociative boundary. And it’s that dissociative boundary that characterizes us as dissociative alters of this one natural mind. And the image of that, of that boundary is our skin, our sense organs, and the external appearance of our self is the image of this dissociative boundary that separates ourselves from our environment. In the language of Reality of Mind, I would say that dissociative boundary is a cognitive inferential isolating layer between our internal mental processes and the mental processes unfolding in mind at large. Now I can say exactly the same thing in the language of representation, in the language of appearances, in the language of images, and say, “Your skin is what keeps your inner metabolism separate from nature outside your body.” I’m saying exactly the same thing using two different languages. So when I say that all is in mind, I don’t mean that it’s all mental processes within your dissociative boundary, within our alter, in your personal conscious inner life. I don’t mean mean that? What I mean is that, uh, nature beyond you, nature outside of you, is mental as well. It corresponds to some transpersonal mental processes that hold their own state. And that’s why when you park your car in the garage when you arrive home from work and you go to sleep and you’re not seeing your car, next morning you go back to the garage and your car is right there where you left it. Why? Because the state, the mental state that corresponds to car has been held intact in a transpersonal mental process that does not depend at all on your personal cognitive state, whether you’re awake or not. That state is held outside of you as an individual, as an individual mind, but it’s not held outside mind as a substrate. It is also mental, but it’s not your mind. That’s what we mean by it. When you talk about your view viewpoint. Sometimes I see you hold up a pen or a cup and you say, look, mine is actually the intuitive viewpoint because I’m saying this exists, whereas the materialists are saying that this is some apprehension that’s possibly distorted, looks nothing like this. Okay, now how does that compare with Douglas Hoff— sorry, Donald Hoffman’s work, which says that this is a virtual reality? It seems like it’s incompatible. And then also there’s someone named Thomas Campbell. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. I don’t know about his work, but I have heard a lot about him. Yeah, I haven’t read his book yet. What have Heard about him? He was a physicist who did a lot of meditation in his early days and came up with a whole theory of nature based on his meditative insights that have to do with simulation. It’s like 400 hours of time to spend in this one thick book. But if you ever do read his book called My Big Toe, that’s Thomas Campbell’s, me and you have to have a conversation about that because I want to know what you think about that. So regardless, he has a similar viewpoint as Donald Hoffman, which says that this world is a virtual reality. Okay, what do you say to that? It’s completely compatible with what I’m saying. Don and I dovetail with each other almost all the way to the end. Only at the very end, very end, there is one tiny little thing, but important, where we diverge. But it’s not a fundamental divergence. I think we will see eye to eye on that. He’s open to it. Um, very shortly we’ll see eye to eye to that, on that. Look, uh, the materialist will deny this bottle in the sense of its concreteness, its color, its texture. Because the materialist will say, well, that concrete— concreteness you feel is entirely inside your head. It’s created by your brain. There is something outside that corresponds to a concrete bottle, but it has no qualities, including the quality of concreteness. It doesn’t have texture, doesn’t have temperature, smoothness, color, none of that. It does have properties that that correspond to this concreteness, but they are not the concreteness. So this bottle exists only in my head. So the materialist denies the reality of the bottle I experience, uh, outside my own mind. They deny that reality. They say the bottle experience exists only in my mind. What is outside has no qualities. Now, I disagree with that because I think this concreteness, this of this bottle exists as an experience. And is that experience inside my head, or is it not? It’s not, because my head too is something that I perceive. If I had no mirror, I would never see my head. So I cannot— I do not say that the experience of this bottle exists in my head, because in my view, the epistemic status and the ontological status of my head is exactly the same as the bottle. Look, they exist side by side. I am perceiving them side by side. Obviously, the bottle is not inside my head as an experience, right? What I do say is that the experiences of the bottle and the experience of seeing my head on the screen right now, they exist in my altar. But my altar is not a head. The head is part of the image of my altar. Do you see what I’m trying to get to? It’s a subtle point. It’s very obvious if you’re not immersed in the assumptions that we inherit from culture. If you can stick your head out of that, it’s obvious what I’m saying. But because we are not able to look at it from a neutral vantage point, it seems subtle. My mental life is not in my head. My head is a partial image of my mental life. Mm-hmm. So what space is this all taking place in? Mind space? I’ll get there. The experience of this bottle is entirely in my mental life. This experience does not exist in mind at large. There are mental processes in mind at large that corresponds to the experience of this bottle. But this bottle is my dashboard. It’s not the world outside. There is something outside, experiential, also a mental process, that corresponds to this bottle on my dashboard. But it is not this bottle. This bottle is the appearance of it. It’s the representation of it. As an appearance, As a representation, the bottle exists in my mental life alone as a dissociated alter, because it’s my alter’s representation. Uh-huh. But it’s not in my head, because my mental life is not in my head. My head too is a representation. So one representation is not inside another representation. They both exist. Exists in my inner mental life. I think part of the confusion for some people who are listening or watching who consider themselves to be materialists or physicalists, or are without knowing, is that when someone says this exists in your head, sometimes what they’re trying to say is this exists in your experience. And what you’re granting is that is the case. It does exist in my experience. It doesn’t exist in my head because head refers to a physical location in spacetime that has a brain and so on. And that is not only a semantic linguistic distinction, it’s a crucial distinction when it comes to your understanding of your place in the world. Because now it’s not all in your head. You are not restricted to your head. Your head is a representation of mental processes that you identify yourself with, but those mental processes are not bound in Look, you can only bind your own mental processes in space if you say that they are inside your head, because your head is what exists in space. Space is the canvas of representations. If you’re not talking about representations, you’re not talking about space, and then it makes no sense to regard yourself as this tiny, irrelevant, minuscule little thing in a huge universe, because you’re not talking about representations anymore, you’re not talking about space. You have to think extra-spatially. Which leads to entirely different perspectives about your worth, about your role in nature, about what you are, about what’s important and what’s not. So it’s not only a linguistic distinction. I have a Dutch word now in mind because it’s the same as the English word, “stopping mind in head.” But “stopping” in Dutch means to put something inside another. Pushing mind inside our heads is one of the most pernicious implications of the materialist worldview you can possibly think of. Because it has limited our being to irrelevance. And we are proud of it. We think we got rid of our hubris. No, we have enormous hubris in other ways. We have the hubris to think that our theories can explain the whole universe. That’s hubris in another form. Form, but we are proud to have made ourselves into nothing because we sort of put our own minds inside our heads, limited it in space. Look, this association— Do you have that hubris by saying that you can explain the entire universe with your theory? I am interpreting the universe. My explanatory power is not one that gives you control over nature. What does that is when you predict nature’s behavior and then you can put nature to work. For your own benefit. And that’s what science does. Science is— you know, we stole fire from the gods. We can put the universe to work for our benefit. Why? Because we can predict nature’s behavior. Do we need to know what nature is? Not the least. A 5-year-old kid can be world champion in a computer game without having any understanding of what the game is. All the hardware and software behind that, the kid doesn’t even know it exists, doesn’t know what it is. It doesn’t care. Does the kid need to understand that to play the game? No. The kid needs to understand the behavior of the the game, and then you can master and win the game. That’s what science does. It tells us how the game works. It tells us how the representations behave. It allows us to predict the representations so we can play the game and win. This is the hubris of control. This is stealing fire from the gods. What I am doing gives us no control whatsoever. It doesn’t allow us to control nature. It allows allows us to make peace with our own nature and our role in nature. What’s that minor place where you and Hoffman disagree, where you think that you’re going to win him over at some point? For Don’s theory to hold, you always need at least two conscious agents, because the dashboard for him arises from an interaction. So you need at least two conscious agents. So he cannot go down to one 1, because his mathematics will not work if you go down to 1. And my view is that that’s profoundly dissatisfying because it seems to arbitrarily require the existence of two completely unrelated things. Why would there be two completely unrelated things existing? I mean, it sort of violates my whole sense of plausibility. And my argument to him is that he can make the mathematics work, even if it goes down to one, one conscious agent. But then he has to use the mathematics of vibration, which is what underlies string theory, M-theory. If you have only one field, you can still recover all complexity from that by imagining that field as a vibrating surface, a multidimensional, hyperdimensional surface, but a surface nonetheless that moves according to different patterns of excitation. If you have that, you can recover any complexity, any arbitrary level of complexity you need to make sense of nature by applying the mathematics of vibration as opposed to the mathematics of interaction. And you can reduce the mathematics of interaction to the mathematics of vibration. If you have two wavefronts that come and interfere with one another constructively or destructively, that’s an interaction. But you can reduce that to the one surface where those wavefronts are are moving. So you can reduce the mathematics of interaction to the mathematics of vibration. Granted, things become a lot more complex, and that’s what M-theory is struggling with. There are so many free parameters in that horrendously complex mathematics that they cannot make any discerning prediction. It’s too complex to wrap one’s head about it. So I think it’s in practice laudable that Don is restricting to the mathematics of interaction, because that makes his work and the work of his team more feasible. It allows us to make progress. So I applaud that. But I also think at the very end, for them to take that very last step, which will not happen in our lifetimes or in the lifetimes of our grandkids, this is far off. But to take that last, very last step step to the most parsimonious view of nature we can have, we will have to translate that mathematics into the mathematics of vibration, which M-theory is ahead— is already ahead of us doing, except that they think of this hyperdimensional brain— they call it a brain of M-theory— they think of that as something that is non-mental. I would argue to you that that is just an aspect of mentality. What they are describing is mind. Space itself is mind. You want to visualize mind at large? Visualize it as empty space, and all the things that pop into existence within space as the patterns of vibration. Empty space is the lake when it’s not rippling. Objects and all the dance of existence are the ripples of that lake. Mind is empty space, and empty space, there is only one conceptually. So I think, Don will— well, his successors and the successors of his successors, I think ultimately we will arrive at that conclusion from a scientific perspective. I think philosophy can arrive at this conclusion today. The limitation is that philosophy cannot predict behavior. And Don, if he can port the theoretical apparatus of science to the mathematics of conscious agents, he will be doing a fundamental step, a fantastic step forward in our understanding of nature, a step that philosophy alone cannot do. Science needs to do that. So I applaud him. I just tell him when we are having our one-on-one conversations that, you know, at the end of the day, you will go to vibrations because philosophically, metaphysically speaking, that’s the only tenable position for you to be in. You have to go down to oneness. Otherwise, Otherwise you have an arbitrary postulate of the existence of completely independent things interacting with one another. Why the hell would nature be like this? Anyway. Where do you disagree with Deepak? I’m sure you overlap 90%. Well, my relationship with Deepak, you know, we never compared notes on an analytical perspective. Because I don’t think he’s really interested in that. He’s interested in reaching people’s hearts, people’s intuitions. He’s interested in helping people live more healthily, in more conformity with natural laws. He’s interested in reaching the common people for whom all these intellectual abstractions are just that, irrelevant abstractions, which is the vast majority of people. And I think he has a much more significant impact in the world, much more, not only because he’s more famous than I am. No, I don’t mean that. I mean that he is speaking about things that are more relevant to most people than what I am speaking about. I think the relevance of what I’m doing to most people comes only later because our cultural narrative makes people depressed based on the wrong reasons. They adopt a materialist story and that leads to existential nihilism. And that story is— we have no reason to believe it to be true. So ultimately, I’m doing this for people’s hearts as well. But it’s indirect. And in the case of Deepak, it’s much more direct. So I never compared notes analytically with him. All I can tell you is that I never heard nonsense from Deepak Chopra. I see him as a wise person. Person who is trying to do something good for the world. Certainly a very positive force in the world. And nothing that he ever said contradicts my thinking. And I, and I think the other way around applies as well. I will let him speak for that. But nothing he, he ever said contradicts my view of reality. On the contrary, we seem to have a very natural, intuitive understanding. We don’t need to compare analytical notes to know that we are both going down the same direction. We are both trying to achieve the same thing in different ways, one more immediate than the other. But there is this natural resonance that doesn’t require us to bother about comparing notes, if you know what I mean. I like him a lot. Where do you agree and disagree with Jordan I don’t know enough about Peterson to pass judgment. I’m very happy to pass judgment. I don’t refrain from it. I’m known for being sharp in this regard. But I do want to pass judgment only on things at least I think I know enough to pass judgment on. And I don’t know enough about Peterson. I know he’s a Jungian, so that’s a point of commonality. So he has my sympathy based on that alone. Where do you disagree with Jung? I don’t. I’m publishing a book in a couple of weeks titled Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, in which I try to make explicit what Jung’s underlying metaphysical thought was throughout his psychology works. I think Jung was a flat-out idealist. He said the collective unconscious and matter in nature are one and the same thing, by which he meant one is the image of the other. Matter is what the collective unconscious beyond your personal self looks like when observed from across a dissociative boundary, which defines our individual minds. So I don’t disagree with him. I think Jung— and there are two intellectuals I consider the most important of the 20th century, and I’m not quite sure which one, but I think Thomas Carl Jung in the 20th century were the two most important intellectuals. They provided the most indispensable, important, crucial insights that we needed then and need now, perhaps more than back then. So I regard him with the highest respect. I think he was a sage. He saw far, way beyond what most people could see. And I put Kuhn on the same level with him, not because Kuhn has the same breadth and depth of insight as Jung. Jung had such a breadth of insights about every aspect of the human condition that it’s unmatchable. I put Thomas Kuhn together with him because Kuhn had one insight about one one thing that was so foundational, so devastatingly important, that that one thing alone is enough for me to put him on the same height as Jung. But if you care about breadth and relevance for the human condition in our everyday life, Jung is unbeatable. And he went so deep that the vast majority of his peers cannot even conceive of what he saw. And he, he did see it. He didn’t hallucinate it. He saw it right there. He pinned it down. But most of his peers are too short-sighted, uh, to even take that level of depth seriously. They think Jung was a schizophrenic. Maybe he was, which doesn’t contradict what I just said. What do you make of Penrose’s orchestrated objective reduction? Have you heard of his his quantum collapse theory, because he’s one of the materialists/physicalists that don’t think our qualia and truth and other concepts are arbitrary, but in fact they’re members of a Platonic world somehow embedded at each spacetime point. Yeah, but look, let me preface it by saying I have great respect for Sir Roger. I think his Nobel Prize this year was too late. It should have come a lot earlier. And I hold him in the highest regard. He and I were featured in a Dutch documentary only a couple of weeks ago. I have great regard for him. But I do sense, and that may have to do with the time during which he had his peak, he had his prime, which was a time in which even a conversation about the plausibility of anything that’s not materialism was not conceivable. Now we can have this conversation. You and I can have this conversation today. And although the majority may disagree with me, the reasonable majority will not consider me a nutcase. Because they see that, well, there are things that materialism can’t make sense of. Arguably everything. So, you know, the discussion, the debate is legitimate. But it was not in the time when Sir Roger was in his prime. So, I’m prefacing this this way because I don’t want to get across as somebody unfairly critical of him. But I will say this. I think a lot of his work tries to reconcile a materialist mode of thinking with the recognition that there are things that can’t be reduced to materialism. And he tries to accommodate it all in a sort of trialism. It’s not even dualism. So for him, there is the physical world, there is the mental world, and then there is the world of the Platonic values. And they are not the same, and all three of them are fundamental. Mental. And I think that’s a step forward from naive materialism. But in another sense, it’s a step backwards because it violates the principle of parsimony. I want to talk to you about that because this principle that we should be frugal with our assumptions, I don’t buy that necessarily. I’m more of the Feynman mindset that nature is as it is. Maybe it’s an onion, maybe it’s of infinite complexity. Complexity. So who are we to impose this miserly quality when it comes to the axioms? We don’t know. So why, why is it that— I understand how it’s intellectually more comprehensible, as well as it’s fun and beautiful when it’s smaller, but I don’t see any reason why nature itself shouldn’t be slightly more complicated than just one, oneness. This is an excellent question. So let’s bite this bullet head-on and, and not hide from it. Science does not need to make many assumptions. Ultimately, it does not need to make any, because it’s studying the behavior of nature. And when it comes to the behavior of nature, you don’t need to assume. You need to set up an experiment, and nature will answer your question by behaving in a certain way, and the question is settled. If you can repeat that experiment done by different groups, then you ensure that you eliminate the subjective aspect from from it, and there is your answer. You don’t need to postulate or speculate or imagine. Nature has behaved in a certain way that gives you the answer. So when Feynman used the onion metaphor, it would have been more accurate, if I could paraphrase him, to say, “If nature behaves like an onion, then the onion is the best predictive model.” And that’s how it is. That’s how things are. Are. And there is no need to postulate oneness because the behavior is best predicted by imagining it as an onion. And I agree completely with him. When it comes to science, assumptions have a very, very restricted role. Make the experiment if you have the technology to do that. We don’t have the technology to do a whole lot of experiments that we would like to make. But the answer from a first principle Hume’s perspective, is there in potentia. It doesn’t require your assumptions. Run the experiment and the behavior of nature will give you the answers, the answers about how nature behaves. So if it behaves like an onion, then it is like an onion. And the question is settled. I agree with Feynman. When it comes, however, to what nature is, not to how it behaves, but what nature is, experiment doesn’t settle the question. It does inform the question. If you have an hypothesis about what nature is, and of course, According to that hypothesis, nature can’t behave in a given way, and then you run an experiment and lo and behold, nature does behave in that way, then that hypothesis is off the table. But there is a whole number of hypotheses that are not contradicted by nature’s behavior. So an experiment, a scientific experiment, doesn’t settle metaphysical questions. It informs those questions. You can be a more educated metaphysician position by paying attention to science. But science alone cannot settle a metaphysical question unless it’s a— it settles it in the negative. It can exclude possibilities, but it cannot settle it in the positive by saying, this is the truth. No scientific experiment can settle the question positively, only by elimination, because the answer in the form of a behavior doesn’t settle the question of what that which behaves is in and of itself. And what does this have to do with not accepting three worlds? Getting there, getting there, getting there. Sorry, sorry, it’s a convoluted answer, but I’m getting there. So if you understand that science cannot settle metaphysical questions, then what criteria do you have to judge which metaphysical hypothesis is superior? The criteria are different, and they are— and I enumerate them for you. Internal logical consistency. Empirical adequacy. In other words, empiricism cannot positively settle the question, but your metaphysical theory cannot contradict observations, otherwise it’s just wrong. So internal logical consistency, empirical adequacy. Coherence is important, and coherence has to do not with the internal logical consistency of your theory, but how it coheres with everything else we do you know. And there is this other great guiding principle, which is conceptual parsimony. Now, I will grant to you that there is nothing etched in stone saying that nature has to be the simplest version of itself. It’s not etched in stone. It’s a subjective value. But I would argue to you that if we ignore this value, we are off to the races. We will be in a madhouse in no time, because you You see, everything can have countless more complex explanations. If you wake up in the morning and you see footprints in your backyard, I’ll mention two possible explanations for that. One, a burglar tried to invade your house, didn’t succeed, went away and left the footprints behind. That’s explanation A. Explanation B, aliens from the Pleiades came through hyperspace, landed in your neighbor’s backyard, stole your neighbor’s shoes, jumped over the fence and went for a stroll in your backyard, then jumped back, put your neighbor’s shoes back where they were, boarded their spaceship and went back to the Pleiades. The second explanation, explanation B, accounts for the observations just as well as the first. Just as well as the first. First. Why do you choose A instead of B? Because B is more conceptually parsimonious. It requires less assumptions. You see, this sounds like an argument for the functionalism of having a small amount of assumptions, but not as to the ontological validity of it. Correct. I would admit that. Yeah, but I admit to that while emphasizing how important it is if we don’t hold to conceptual parsimony as a value for identifying the best metaphysical options— forget science, those questions are settled by experiment. We are talking about being here, about metaphysics. If we ignore conceptual parsimony, we have to embrace the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And I don’t mean this metaphorically, I mean this literally. Because the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory accounts for all facts just as well as quantum field theory and relativity. You can always explain all facts by saying that the invisible noodly appendages of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is orchestrating everything the way it is. So yes, it’s an epistemic and subjective criterion. I admit to that. There’s nothing objective etched in stone in nature saying that nature has to be the simplest version of itself. So I admit to that. But with one hand, I admit to that. With the other hand, I highlight to you how indispensable this subjective criterion is. Because the, the alternative is madness. It’s, it’s complete nonsense. It’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster being taken very seriously. Bernardo, I love you. I feel like we’re at a oneness. I feel like your theory may be true because I’m, I’m here in tune with you right now. But I don’t see your theory as being much more different than the Flying Spaghetti Monster because you’re saying— so I don’t mean that as insulting at all, please. Please. I’m so— I’ll admit that I know so little that I wouldn’t even identify as being agnostic. I’m so agnostic that I’m not even agnostic, but I know very little too. Right, right, right. Okay, so what— so how is your theory much different than someone saying that, well, that’s just the way it is because God made it that way? And why can’t one just say that? That seems like it’s actually even more simpler. What’s even more simpler, by the way? Solipsism. So I’m wondering, like, why don’t you just choose that? I do have my own ideas as to why you don’t, but we can talk about that after. I wrote about that. Look, I am a naturalist, a complete naturalist. I think things behave the way they behave because nature is what it is. And we can reduce things. We can reduce the human organism down to organs and organs down to tissues and tissues down to cells and cells to molecules and molecules to atoms and atoms to subatomic particles and those to quantum fields. So I grant all that. I’m a naturalist. I’m not saying that things happen the way they are simply because they are what they are. This is an expression of those who deny reductionism. I don’t deny reductionism. I am an extreme reductionist. I want to reduce everything to one, right? I’m an extreme form of a reductionist and an extreme form of a naturalist. Naturalist, because I say what is happening is because nature is what it is, and it’s all— it can all be reduced to that one thing that nature is. Um, the thing is, whatever position you have as a reductionist, at the end you come to something that is not further reducible. You cannot explain one thing in terms of another forever. You have to come to at least You have to come to something that is reducible at the end, but in terms of which you can explain everything else. Philosophers call this your reduction set, your reduction base. When you say reduction base, that’s the same as math, it’s the axioms? Yeah, it correlates with that. Yeah. The axioms are the reduction base of a mathematical theory. Yeah. But I mean that in an ontological sense, not in a modeling sense. Plain sense. So all reductionists will have to have a reduction base with at least one element, because the alternative to that is circularity, and nobody, nobody seriously proposing circularity. That’s what— yeah, okay, we could talk about that after. There are some people, I’m sure you get emails of some people saying somehow we can bootstrap ourselves from nothing. Now there are some people who say even quantum fluctuations, but that requires— you need at least potentials. Yes, you cannot pull something out of nothing. There has to be at least potentials. So they are defining existence in a subtly different and more restrictive way. But okay, I understand. To go back to the point, every reductionist needs a reduction with at least one element. So why do I think my theory is more parsimonious? Well, let’s compare to the competition. Let’s see what else is on the table out there. If you are a naive materialist, the competition is a reduction base that contains every element element in the menu of fundamental particles of our best model of microscopic nature we have today. And there is a menu of several particles, several fermions, the bosons. There are several particles. It’s over a dozen. So if you’re a naive materialist, that’s your reduction base. Those things exist because they just exist, and they have no relation to each other, and they are what they are simply because they are what they are. That’s it. You end there. Okay, that— I submit to you that that’s less parsimonious than reducing everything to one natural consciousness. Now let’s look at the more sophisticated, less naive competition. Let’s look at the quantum field theorists. They reduce those particles to the corresponding fields. So The different electrons are not really separate. They are not all in your reduction base. They are just patterns of vibration of one field for all electrons. Okay, that’s a huge step forward. Now instead of a reduction base with gazillions of elements, now we have only a handful, one field for each type of fundamental subatomic particle. But it is still several, several elements in your reduction base. So I’m more parsimonious than that. So is there more sophisticated competition? Well, there is, there is the string theory. Theorists, of the unified field quantum theorists, or the loop quantum gravity folks, or the M-theorists, and they reduce those fields and they try to reduce those fields to one. But then they fail to explain consciousness because the trick of a reduction base is not only that it has to be as small as possible, but you have to explain everything in terms of it. That’s the criterion. You can have a reduction with only one arbitrary element by saying, “Well, I explain one thing with this one arbitrary element, but I fail to explain everything else.” Well, that’s not fair. That’s not how the game’s played. So you have to put as few elements in there, but you still have to explain everything else in terms of them. I submit to you that the M-theorists and unified quantum field theorists, they fail to do that unless they say that their quantum field is just a model for consciousness. And then you can reduce everything to that. So my claim to having a parsimonious theory of nature, a philosophical one, not a scientific one, is based on the fact that I believe, and that’s the case I have been putting forward for years in a variety of books and articles, scientific and otherwise, technical and otherwise, I believe I can argue that I can reduce everything to one field of consciousness, if you will, one instinctive, natural consciousness that underlies all reality. If I can do that, then I think it’s an objective fact that my theory is the most parsimonious. It may not be the right one, but of those on the table, it’s definitely the most parsimonious. Have you heard of Ken Wilber? I have heard of him and integral theory, and I know nothing about it. Okay, so how about, where do you disagree with Schopenhauer. I know he’s your— you’re standing on the shoulders of him and you grant him plenty of status, but I’m curious, given that you— you know, something I don’t like about watching philosophers debate is you’re somewhat characteristic of this as well, is they’ll reference Schopenhauer and then certain ancient texts. You don’t do this all the time, but I, I don’t like that because it’s as if Schopenhauer power is interpretable, but it’s not as if there’s a consensus on that, and it’s not as if there’s a consensus as to what the ancient texts mean. So when people appeal to them, I’m thinking the ideas have to stand on their own now. You can always say— it says something funny about Nietzsche is that Nietzsche philosophized with the hammer, famously. And when you read it, it’s like someone with a megaphone speaking from a one-way mirror, and then you can’t speak back to them. So what do you mean when you said that there’s no such thing facts. Well, then you’re just left with, well, he said there’s no such thing as facts, and he said it so emphatically. Okay, let me interpret. That’s interesting. But you can’t actually converse with them. So either way, that’s just a little rant. When you talk about Schopenhauer, can you compare and contrast? You’ve studied Schopenhauer probably more than anyone else that I know, or maybe anyone else on the planet. So where do you agree and disagree with him on— can I comment just briefly on your preface to the question? I don’t think it’s fair to compare Nietzsche to Schopenhauer in that sense, because Nietzsche, although you can discern his meanings to exclude at least the most outrageous interpretations of him, like the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche is outrageous. He said the contrary of what— Nietzsche was not a nationalist. He was an anti-nationalist. He was the first European. He called himself the first European. He didn’t care about national boundaries. He cared about culture, and he was very critical of German culture. So his co-opting by the Nazis was just outrageous. Right. One of the greatest offenses in the history of philosophy. But he wrote in a gnomic way, because his eyesight was so poor, he couldn’t write real books. His only real complete book was The Birth of Tragedy, which was a first. Everything else was a collection of extended offerings aphorisms. In the Genealogy of Morals, he tried to write 3 or 4 more complete essays, but they are essays. Even the Genealogy of Morals is not really a complete book. His only book was the first. So he couldn’t see, he couldn’t write properly, so he couldn’t really spend a lot of time elaborating on his ideas. He had to make brief notes, and he published those notes in the form of aphorisms. The Gay Science or because these words have been co-opted today, The Joyful Wisdom, his book, is a collection of aphorisms, and so is Human, All Too Human. It’s a collection of aphorisms. So it’s very difficult to say what Nietzsche really meant, especially because he changed his mind during his life. He was very fond of Schopenhauer at some point in the early days, then he said Schopenhauer was completely wrong and he blundered everything. He actually writes writes that. Schopenhauer blundered this just like he blundered about anything else. He says that in his weird autobiography, Ecce Homo. So it’s very difficult to pin down Nietzsche’s meaning because you have to ask, well, when was he writing? If you’re saying that Nietzsche thought this, when did he think this? Was it in the early days, in the mid-career, or in the late days? And even then it’s difficult to pin down his meaning. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, was consistent. The second edition of The World as Will and Representation, or the final edition in his lifetime of The World as Will and Representation, I believe came in 1853. The first edition was in 1818. And guess what? He extended it, but he didn’t change a word of the first edition. He didn’t change a word of what he wrote in his early 30s and late 20s. When he was in his late So the coherence of his message is not comparable with Nietzsche, because Schopenhauer wrote the same thing over and over again in a multitude of different ways, never really contradicting himself, if you have the eyes to read it and not to misinterpret it. So I think we can pin down what Schopenhauer thought, whether he’s right or wrong. Now, where do I disagree with him? I am not a misogynist, to begin with. Well, he— okay. He was a terrible misogynist, a censorable misogynist, a contemptible misogynist. He was an optimist. Sorry, was Schopenhauer the one that said the devil’s laughter is what’s heard after sex? He was not against sex. No, no, it’s just that that demonstrates the difference between our base desires and our intellect, that right after copulation masturbation, the devil’s laughter is heard because it’s right then that you’re like, what am I doing? Why did I masturbate to that? Who am I? I don’t know. Why am I here? My study of Schopenhauer is mostly focused on his metaphysics. And he had a lot more to say just about everything else. But I focus on his metaphysics. It could be. I do not know. In a sense, I know less of Schopenhauer than I know of Nietzsche. I certainly know less of Schopenhauer than I know of Jung because the latter two, Jung, Nietzsche, I’ve read everything. Thing they ever wrote, including, uh, the Nachlass. That’s commendable. Jung is difficult to read, like extremely, extremely dense, and there’s so much flowery language. It’s ostentatious. It takes me maybe 4 times the time that I would spend reading anything else just to read him. Can I make a suggestion for you? On the first read, ignore the footnotes. Do yourself this favor. When you’re reading a book by Jung for the time: don’t read the footnotes. It will completely break the flow of the book. It will drive you nuts because he is scholastic beyond belief. He’s like a middle-aged scholastic philosopher when it comes to footnotes. Don’t read them. Then after you finished reading it, yeah, after you read it once, twice, on the third read, then you come back and then read the footnotes. But don’t do this disfavor to yourself and read the footnotes on the first on the first read. It will make the work impossible. It will just get stuck in a morass of obscure references that is impossible to manage. Okay. About Schopenhauer. Yeah, Schopenhauer. Philosophically, I have a hard time finding a salient point of disagreement. I would say this: I don’t think he went all the way. He didn’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. He left some points open for which he just hinted at or suggested solutions. For instance, he hinted at dissociation as the mechanism to explain why we have personal will, while the will in fact is unitary because it’s not bound by space and time, by the principle of individuation, as he called it. In other words, to separate one thing from another, according to Schopenhauer, you need to say that they either occupy different volumes of space or they occupy the same volume of space at different points in time. If there is no space-time within which you can tear things apart— There has to be some differentiation. Yeah. Yeah. Then things are one. And he said space and time is a mode of cognition. It doesn’t exist out there. Therefore, the will, the world as it is in itself, ultimately, out there can only be one, because there is no space-time for you to have diversity. Yet he admitted that we are individual beings, and animals too. He says that ultimately we are not, because he said— and now I will quote word by word— because the subject, the eye that sees the world through us, is the same eye that sees the world through every other animal. So there is unity, but there is a variety of perspectives. Perspectives. There is unity in essence, but a variety of perspectives. And he failed to account for how this variety of perspectives arose in the first place. He hinted at it by writing an entire chapter about cognitive associations, and how without the ability to cognitively associate one thing with another, we would have no unity of mind. He wrote an entire chapter about about that. But he failed to take the immediate next step, is to say, but it is the lack of cognitive associations that explain the variety of points of view. And that’s what makes the unitary will seem to be many. Now, he didn’t take that bloody final step, although he flirted with it. He hinted at it. How’s that a step? Because it sounds like what you’re saying is, well, how is there a difference when we’re all from the same provenance, from the same fountainhead. You have to explain the illusion of separation. Uh-huh. And then you’re saying, well, you just explain it by saying that we’re dissociated. You have to propose a mechanism that allows you to reduce diversity to a unity, because diversity simply happens as an appearance. I can’t read your thoughts. No, I cannot I can’t help but experiencing differentiation between me and you, because I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking right now. I don’t know how you feel about life and the world. So I have to account for this variety of perspectives and this seeming differentiation, even if it’s not true differentiation in the sense that at the fundamental level there is no differentiation at all. You have to account for how at least the appearance of differentiation arises. And Schopenhauer Lar flirted with a way to account for that, but didn’t go all the way. So instead of disagreeing with him, I could point out the few places where I think I’m prepared to go beyond, to go further than he did. But of course, it’s much easier for me to do that today because I have an entire scientific dictionary of terms whose meaning people already understand. I can talk about dissociation today because I know there’s a whole branch of science called psychiatry that studied this phenomenon, accounted for it, described it. Uh, we know a lot about it, so I can use one word and say dissociation and account for it. No, Schopenhauer didn’t have any of that. So admittedly, if I had lived in his time with the ideas that I have today, I would have had, um, an unfathomably bigger challenge than he had. And I, I’m very open about this. I think I would have done a much, much, much worse job than he did in his time. So I see himself as superior to me in almost every way. But yeah, with the benefits of living in a much more advanced scientific culture today and being able to use terms and leverage knowledge that is available to everyone today and was not available at his time, then I dare say we can go beyond what he did. He went beyond Kant, and I think today we can go on him. This gets to the heart of what it means to be one, oneness. And also, you can help me out here. Sometimes when I speak about the people who think that we all belong to one vellum, we’re just one consciousness and we’re just excitations of so-and-so, I call them the New Age spiritual types. But I, I don’t mean that derogatorily. I don’t mean that in any defamatory manner. I don’t— I just don’t know how else to refer to them because not all of them say completely comfortable. No, I mean it derogatorily. Yeah, yeah. So do you mind giving me a word that I can use such that those people won’t roll their eyes when I refer to them? Because I, I’m not even saying that I’m not one of them. Like, I, I’m, I’m probably closer to them than they think, but I don’t want to demean them. Yeah, let’s start this by making some obvious admissions, things that we cannot help but admit. There is a lot of New Age bullshit. There is a lot of New Age nonsense. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the whole New Age movement is bullshit that is extremely implausible. That’s not how things happen. But a lot of the noisy, visible part of the New Age is flagrant nonsense. It’s flagrant gullible bullshit. And I don’t hold my tongue back for that. And I regret that the idea of one consciousness is now in the popular mind so associated with that kind of gullible New Age spiritual woo-woo blah blah. I don’t want to use the term woo-woo because it’s right. It works. What would be two examples of woo-woo from the New Age types? Yeah, now you put me in a tough position. And I’ll tell you why I say this, because to me, my mind is so— it’s trying to find what’s true in even what sounds insensate, that if they say, well, we can remote view and we can have psychic phenomena and UFOs exist and so on— I know that’s not necessarily New Age. But whatever it may be, I’m always thinking, well, how is that true in some way? Okay, first of all, how’s it false? It’s immediate to both you and I how that could be false. That’s our natural predilection. But then I’m thinking, well, how is it true? And then I find that it’s true in ways that are revealing of such depth that for me to dismiss them outright would be for me to be like Sabina Hossenfelder, who I admire and I’ve had on this channel. I do too. She has good things to Yeah, but she is much like almost any materialist that says, well, if you can’t define it, then don’t bother with it. It’s— if it sounds on the surface, superficially, cosmetically to be foolish, then it is not worth your time. Go shut up and calculate. So she has that mindset, whereas I have the mindset of, of there’s, there’s gold in the, in the rubble, and I’ll fossick, I’ll search around. I have the same mindset. Great, great, great, great, great. So what’s— so given Given that, give one example of what the New Age people take. I’m not going to zoom in on a specific person, although I could. I’ll say this: most of it, I think, is nonsensical. The core of it, the essence of it, probably is not. I don’t want to name authors, but I can give you sort of examples, and if you can match examples to authors, then it’s your problem. You’re doing this, not me. I don’t care too much about that. I’m more Ideas that the stuff that was so visible before 2012, all that 2012 phenomenon about— I have difficulties even paraphrasing it because it was so nonsensical. I have difficulty even paraphrasing it. I remember, yeah, the end of the world stuff. But there was intricate theories being proposed. Like there are waves of a particular frequency coming from the center of the galaxy and they enter your heart. And those kinds of— or there are aliens in the Pleiades that are at war with some kind of— You keep mentioning the Pleiades. And I associate that so much with the New Age. But there are aliens who are at war with a cabal of human beings. And this war is happening in the space above our heads right now as we We go busy ourselves with banal work and daily life. I mean, all this kind of bullshit, toxic nonsense made to create fictional images and make money. That stuff that is exploitative, outright exploitative. And I could not— I’m revealing myself more now to you than I have ever done in an interview, my level of contempt for the bullshit that many of my critics feel contempt for runs above the contempt my critics have above those things. Well, that lends credence, more credence to you. I don’t think so, because it’s a subjective thing. It’s an emotional thing. It’s not impartial. What I mean to is that if you find a certain set of ideas to be ridiculous that people associate you with, but yet you believe some overlap of it, not all of it, then that means that you’re not driven there by pure want or desire. Yeah, but the reason I have contempt for them is not because I am associated with them. I don’t care too much about that. I have my message to say and I say my message. And if you want to associate me with something I didn’t say, well, that’s your problem. It’s not my problem. I don’t have a problem with that. Even if I didn’t play the role I’m playing, now, an author promoting a certain metaphysical view. Suppose I was just— suppose I were still just an executive in high-tech, in high technology, or an engineer. I would still have contempt. I have such a natural, spontaneous contempt for some of that bullshit. Yeah, that it goes beyond what, what you could say, well, this is reasonable and thought through. No, it’s just a visceral reaction that I have sometimes. But it’s not to all of the New Age. I mean, Deepak, for instance, is often associated with the New Age. Maybe that was the case in the ’80s, I don’t know, because I didn’t look. But the Deepak I have known for 8 years now, I have no association between him and New Age bullshit, because everything he says I find eminently reasonable and important, but there is stuff in the New Age, you know, especially when it comes to the Pleiades and, and cabals that— oh, okay, Bernardo, let me reveal myself then to you a little bit about Deepak. So here’s what I see with Deepak, not about his ideas but more about his personality. What I see when he interviews some of the intellectuals like Stuart Hameroff or even yourself— I watched that interview— I see someone who is not like please, I don’t mean this in a, in a negative way. I don’t see someone who is searching for the truth no matter how it is. I see someone as already accepting that consciousness is one and that the ancient Indian text that he has grew up with, grown up with, is correct in some way, shape, or form. And, and that’s fine because it could be like, who knows, right? Christianity could be correct. Judaism could be correct. Islam could be correct. Whatever, whatever it may be. But I see him as when he’s interviewing scientist. He’s looking because he’s been so hurt. I think I see someone who’s been so hurt by the accusations from the ’90s or early 2000s of being unscientific and using woo-woo that he now, when he sees a scientist that agrees with him 5% in some interpretation, he’s like, can you, can you elaborate on that 5%? Oh, okay. And so when, when people accuse me of saying that, that, that, that I’m saying unscientific BS, what are you saying to that. He’ll ask that question plenty. And I see it as a little boy who’s just been so hurt that he wants the validation from the scientific community, and so he’s willing to interpret what the scientist is saying in order to validate what he already believes in, and, or, and in order to shove it in the face of his critics. That’s what I see. Now, that’s almost like the Jungian in me, or the Freudian, that’s looking for the unconscious motivations. Yeah. But I, I can’t help but see that. I also see this a bit in almost anyone who has a worldview that they ardently defend. Now there’s great— they should. I’m an apologist for apologists in general because apologist means to defend what you believe in with justifications. And I think that you should, if you believe in something, if you’re an intellectual, you should justify it. But then there’s some people who justify it, like let’s say Sam Harris or Deepak or— it runs the gamut. It’s more than just an intellectual justification. It seems more like defensiveness. And it ended. And then I wonder how much of what they believe is because they’ve dispassionately took an assessment of the data and come to the conclusion, rather than they have some predilection or some predisposition. Much like you said, which is so interesting, about materialism. Sam Harris would say, well, look, the way that you can believe what I’m saying is that it goes against my own interests, because I would love to believe that Christianity was correct. Correct. So then if someone says that and they don’t believe it, then you— then that lends a bit more credence. But then at the same time, Sam Harris says, I don’t want to believe in a God that kills people so arbitrarily. And also, heaven comes with hell in some interpretations, right? And you said that about materialism, is that this is extremely interesting. In materialism, there is comfort. As much as the atheist would say that there’s no comfort, there’s more comfort in traditional religion, yet I don’t agree with that because I am such a rationalist. Well, there’s comfort in knowing that your life is going to end. Oh, how’s there comfort in knowing my life is going to end? Because you don’t know what is at the other side. You don’t know if agony awaits you infinitely, infinite torment or infinite pleasure. You don’t know. And so there is comfort in the certainty that maybe this is it. That’s so interesting. I never heard it posed that way before. It’s the elephant in the room and it’s such an enormous elephant that people don’t see it. They only see a patch of skin in front of them because the elephant is giant. Let’s just put it this way, and I’m sure everybody will agree with this because it’s objectively the case. The single greatest fear human beings have always had, of any generation before the 19th century, the single greatest fear in the lives of every human being has been the experiential state after body death. The fear of what comes after is what has kept people in line and turned the Christian Church into a political institution of tremendous power, to the point that it still has a country of its own, the Vatican. Mm-hmm. It was the leveraging and the use of that fear of what will happen to you after you die. Will you go to hell, or will you go to heaven? Would there be monks monsters. That has been the greatest single fear in the history of humanity. It has allowed peoples to be controlled throughout history, and it is the one thing that materialism has taken off the table. It has neutered the greatest fear in the history of humankind. It’s off the table. It’s no longer credible. You do not need to worry about that. This is a social historical fact and a psychological fact. Do you fear death? And now I do, right in this moment. You do? Or do you mean generally speaking? I do. Look, I am as intellectually convinced as one can possibly be that my core subjectivity is— and your, which is the same in you, which is the same in my cat everywhere, is the one entity in the reduction base. In other words, all reality unfolds in it. It’s the one thing that exists, and therefore it has nowhere to go, and it’s never going to end. It’s where beginnings— Sorry, what has no way— What is not going anywhere? The core subjectivity in me is going nowhere, because everything that happens happens in it. And it’s not only my core subjectivity. The core subjectivity in me is the same core subjectivity in you. It’s the one eye of the world that looks out from every creature, as Schopenhauer put it. So I’m as intellectually convinced as one can be that my subjectivity survives bodily death and probably witnesses the entire process. Now, what is the best and safe analog to death we have today? What’s the one thing we can do that comes the closest to death physiologically and, and still can be done safely, that’s how those psychedelics— the psychedelics, the way they operate is by significantly reducing brain activity. Not anesthesia? Anesthesia is dissociative. It increases noise levels in your brain. It doesn’t necessarily reduce brain activity. I see. There is a strong scientific argument to be made that you are not unconscious during anesthesia. You are just incoherent. So you cannot focus on any particular experience. That’s a frightening thought, man. No, no, no, no. It means that you do not suffer. There is too much incoherence in brain signals to form the coherent experience of a profound pain. It can’t happen because the signal is dispersed. To your conscious self. But what if there are other parts of you that are feeling it that can remember, much like when you have childhood trauma and then you dissociate? There is a part of you that’s feeling everything that can possibly be felt, has ever been felt, and will ever be felt, right? If it’s all one consciousness, there is a part of you. Correct. That’s good too. Okay, about death. Where was I going? Oh, death. Yeah. So the best model we have is psychedelics, actually, not anesthesia, because psychedelics under neuroimaging, they have been proven. Every psychedelic studied so far since 2012 until now has had this consistent behavior. Brain activity significantly reduces, especially in the default mode network, the part of your brain that has to do with your individual sense of yourself, the part of your brain, the process in your brain that says, “I am Curt,” or “I am Bernardo.” That part of brain activity is basically smashed. Your brain goes to sleep in that regard. And I know from experience that the experience that is correlated with that, which is called ego dissolution, isn’t incredibly difficult experience to undergo. It’s when you’re constantly dying and you’re never dead. It’s that feeling of losing everything that you are or was. Have you experienced ego death? Yeah, I have experienced ego dissolution under high-dose psychedelics more than once. Does it get easier? In a certain way, yes. In a certain way, no. The feelings are nevertheless powerful. So in that sense, it does not get easier. The feelings are just as intense. I’ve experienced something akin to ego death where it’s like I’m in a oneness, I’m in a void, but it wasn’t black, it was white. But I felt like almost like the tentacles of an octopus, and then you go back to the head, and I couldn’t explain it any other way. And everything made sense. You get this profound realization that, oh, the laws of physics are the way because of so-and-so, but then you forget so and so. And then even if you do remember it days later, you’re like, that doesn’t make sense. Discard it. The tentacles are the dissociative pathways and you are undergoing a reduction in dissociation and your mind presents itself to you in a pictorial manner. And then you’re going back from the tentacles to the head, to the Godhead, from the dissociated tentacles. It makes all sense of the world. But look, nobody has ever physically died from psychedelic ingestion. It’s not physically possible. People die of the stupidity they do while under the influence. But your ego does die. You as a body don’t, but your ego, your sense of an individual agency, of being an individual agent, that sense is smashed to smithereens. And it feels as death because it smashes that which you think you are. And it feels horrible. So doing it repeatedly, it feels as horrible. But there is one silver lining, and that is, you know what’s happening. And there’s a little voice in the back of your head saying, “Just hang on tight, this will pass, and there is bliss on the other side.” And there is, because when your sense of individual self dissolves, you are the universe. And that’s such— it’s the greatest joy one can imagine. It’s a profound sense of identification with the true reality, and everything else until that point was an illusion. And it’s a reality of total acceptance, total integration, because you are that which needs to to accept. So it completes an unconditional acceptance. But before that heaven, there is the hell of ego dissociation, parting with that— what did I say? Ego dissociation? No, I meant ego dissolution, which corresponds to a reduction in dissociation, because the ego is the dissociative process. So when the ego dissolves, it’s the dissociation that is dissolving. So it’s a uniting? A reuniting, a reintegration, which is bliss. It’s blissful, except that in that in-between stage, it feels like you are being annihilated. Your soul is being annihilated. And it’s the worst experience that I think that I have ever had. No, worse than that is the re-entry, is when you are in the bliss and then you come back to the ego. That’s worse. But ego dissolution is terrible. And my own theory informed me that physical death, real death, permanent death, when you die and you’re dead, that’s the ultimate ego dissolution. So I know bliss is coming, and I will know bliss is coming, and I’m thankful to psychedelics for that, for not telling me this only conceptually, but showing me what it is. So being convinced to the bone that ultimately bliss is coming, but I shiver by thinking of what ultimate ego dissolution might feel like. And I dread it. And I fear it. Profoundly. And I didn’t fear it when I was a sort of unthinking materialist by default. Because there’s literally nothing to fear when you’re dead. You’re dead! There is nobody there to feel bad. It takes such strength to admit that, because most people are the opposite, where they’ll say, “I was fearful of death when I was a materialist, then I died with ego dissolution.” Dissolution. That’s right, dissolution. And then I came back and I realized, okay, well, death is just another state that is not much different than this and it’s blissful and so on. Well, you know, if what you told me about Sam Harris saying that you can’t trust what he says because it goes against what he wishes, if that’s true, I mean, that’s nonsensical. Even if it’s true that he thinks that, I mean, it’s the ultimate logical fallacy. This is not a logical argument. Argument for the validity of your position to say, “Well, I fear it.” So yes, I could apply that to myself, and you’re doing me the favor of doing that. You’re being very kind to me. But to be very honest, Curt, I don’t think this means anything. It has no logical force. Whether I like the conclusion or not has no bearing on the force of my argument for that conclusion. People should look at my argument. Does my argument hold water? So if some Harris thinks I should trust what he says because it goes against what he wishes, I would say, I don’t give a damn what you wish or don’t wish. Tell me your argument. I will judge your argument, not how you feel about it. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So the fact that I feel bad about the idealist sense of death, that consciousness persists and we want to go ego dissolution, I do fear that. And I’m saying that to you not because I’m trying to promote myself. On the other, precisely the contrary. But I don’t think you or anybody should construe this as something that helps the force of my argument. It shouldn’t. My argument hopefully is objective. How I feel about its implications should be irrelevant. It is irrelevant to me. When people go in states and they say that what I experienced was real, it was more real than this, you talked about this a few times, and then we dismiss that reality. Should we be? Now, there are good reasons to dismiss it because I imagine— well, this is just a speculation on my part. Though it’s— though there’s some basis to it. I think Professor John Vervaeke said that the sense of realness can be induced. There’s a cortical loop inside your brain, and the faster it goes— there’s a certain cortical loop, I don’t recall which one— the faster it is, the more you feel like that’s real, whatever it is. So then you could say, well, psychedelics spin that wheel quicker, so you feel as if it’s real, but it’s not necessarily real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then how do we— what do we— okay, yeah, continue. My relationship with psychedelic gnosis is probably the reverse of what most psychonauts would report. I’m not really a psychonaut. I did that as a sort of a part of a research effort. It’s not something that I was exultant about doing. It’s, you know, if I’m talking, if I’m going to talk about consciousness, I better know what I’m talking about. So I felt obliged to do that. And it has contributed a lot to my development as a person. And so I’m thankful to psychedelics for that, even though I think it’s not for everyone and should be done with care. Yeah. And not done when it’s not legal. Um, my sense of psychedelic gnosis is the following: there is no doubt that when you are deep within a trip, when you pass those initial stages which are hallucinatory in nature, but when you pass through that, when you break through really to the other side, there is no doubting that, uh, that feeling that this is Ultra real. This is a lot more real than where I was coming from. I was completely deluded. I was in some kind of trance. And now I see what’s really real. So that experience exists. There’s no doubt about that. Can you explain it away? No doubt about that either. Uh, whether the explanations are true or not, I reserve judgment. But can you in principle explain that sense of reality away in the way you suggest, like something spinning, some mental process spinning faster in your brain? Possibly. Is that what is relevant about this? I would say no, it’s completely irrelevant. Let me tell you what is relevant about that sense of realness. It’s stronger than the sense of realness you have now. So if you can explain that away, on the same basis, you explain— you can explain this away right now. So the message of the psychedelic experience for me is is not that that is real and this is an illusion. The message is that this is an illusion. Do you see what I mean? If you think— flip it around, turn it the other way around. The message is not that’s real. The message is this is not real in the way we think it is real. This too is a mental configuration. It’s something that mind is doing. So if mind can do something that makes you have that sense of ultra-reality in a psychedelic state, and you explain that away by saying it’s just mind, please be consistent with yourself and do the same here. If your sense of reality now is less real than that, please tell yourself, inform yourself, this too is a trick of mind. There, that is the important thing. Let’s talk about the malleability of reality, how much we can control it. Because in a dream, or even in a psychedelic state where it seems like what we’re experiencing is entirely real— now that’s false when it comes to dreams. I don’t recall a dream where I felt like it was more real than reality. But either way, in a dream you can have a lucid dream and you can control. That doesn’t seem to apply here. But yet I hear many mystics and so on say that this is a dream, we need to wake up, and that’s what enlightenment is, or nirvana. And so on. So what I’m curious about is, it seems fair, it seems evident to people like me and you that we can control our environment around us with will. So that is with our thoughts. Now, it’s not infinite because I cannot grow a new arm from my chest like a Mortal Kombat character, but, but then that means that there are limitations. Now, what I’m wondering is, what are those limitations? Are those limitations true? Can one overcome virtually any limitation with sheer will? What does that look like? I don’t think so. And I think there is very abundant evidence to the contrary. The essence of your question is, can the ego control everything? Can the ego control the rest of mind, dissociated and not dissociated aspects of it? I would say it’s very fairly evident that it cannot. Um, look, we can’t control our Most dreams, even when you are having a lucid dream, often you can’t control it. I have had many lucid dreams when I was younger of a dog running after me, and I knew it was a lucid dream, and I was like, oh man, I just need to wake up, wake up, wake up, and I couldn’t wake up, and I couldn’t stop the dog even though I knew it was a lucid dream. Kurt, we can’t control our thoughts. You don’t know where your next thought is coming from. Coming from. You can’t control your fears, your emotions. You can’t control your desires. You can act on them, but you can’t choose what you desire. Now, you can go after what you desire, but you can’t choose that. Otherwise, we would all be choosing to desire, to desire exactly that which we have. You can’t control our fantasies, our imagination. A schizophrenic person, who for me is just a human being with a different settings, but not different from me or you, cannot control his, quote, hallucinations. We can’t control our minds, let alone the world. We have very, very little control of our own minds. If you think of it, this idea that the difference between reality and dream is that we can control a dream and you can’t control reality, it’s a widespread intuition, but it’s a surprising how quickly it melts away if you just give it some thought. We can’t control the dreams, just like we can’t control reality. We can’t control even the thoughts we have in this reality. We can’t control our opinions. Our choices seem to be limited to practicalities, like I seem to be able to choose my mortgage package. I seem to be able to choose which car I would drive. Can I choose my partner? No, I can’t even choose my partner. I don’t choose who I fall in love with. Yeah, yeah. I’m assuming that we’re having a bit of a conflict with what it means to be I. What is the I choosing? Because that’s the— Exactly. Okay, you go, you go. It’s because the I we think is choosing doesn’t even exist. It’s a dissociative condition. It’s not real. It’s an appearance, a natural appearance, a natural process registered by us as something that seems to be real, but it’s not. It’s reduced It’s explainable in terms of a broader mind. So the “I” that chooses is not even there. How can it possibly choose? Of course it’s not choosing, it doesn’t exist. Look, did I choose to write the books I wrote? No, I didn’t. Did I choose to be working for Essentia Foundation today? I didn’t. What foundation? Did I choose to be an engineer? Essentia Foundation. It’s a foundation dedicated to promoting idealism. I didn’t choose that. I have only achieved peace in my life by— how to say— by accepting that that which I ordinarily think as “I” is not choosing anything in my life. And there is freedom and liberation in that acceptance, because there is a sense in which you let responsibility go, that you are riding a wave and you’re not choosing where the wave is going. Your only choice is is, do I swim against it or do I go with it? And if you go with it, you have an easier time. That’s about it. But you’re not going to change the direction in which you are going because the wave overpowers you. In Jungian terminology, what’s choosing is the collective unconscious. It’s what we call the unconscious. It’s not unconscious at all. What Jung meant was the non-self-reflective parts of mind, the parts of mind that are not accessible through explicit introspection. But it’s consciousness. It is conscious. Unconscious, and Jung used the word psychic for it. It is psychic, it’s psychic in nature, meaning it’s experiential, but it’s not accessible through explicit introspection. So it is that which is choosing. It is the collective unconscious. It is the less dissociated parts of our minds, or the completely non-dissociated mind at large. That’s the natural wave. Remember, I am a naturalist, and nature is a big wave. It’s going somewhere. We can choose to swim with it or swim against it. You can choose to be of it or to rebel against it and lose. You’re guaranteed to lose. Super interesting. Super interesting. So you’re saying that nature is this huge force and it generally controls you way more than you think. You are an aspect of it. So you’re not even separate from it. So even to say it controls you is already a categorical mistake. You are not distinct from it. But you just have a hallucinated narrative about what you are. In other words, nature has a hallucinated narrative about what it is, and it goes in conflict against itself because of it. Choices are instinctive. There is something instinctive that runs through you and is calling the shots, all the important shots. The problem is we think it is us choosing it, so we rebel against it, or we regret choices, and suffering pours out from that dynamics, which is also a natural dynamics. It’s nature fooling itself, its own It’s natural. So the choice to swim with the current rather than against it, is that choice yours or is that choice ultimately another current? In which case— Nature can offer less resistance against itself. Let’s put it that way. Because you see, it’s impossible to use terms in a completely unambiguous way because terms like “I” or “doing” or “resisting” or “nature,” they have already a social meaning. Meaning. So if I try to be completely accurate, I will contradict that social meaning, and nobody will understand what I’m trying to say. So I have to be ambiguous and seemingly contradictory per force if I am to use language. I don’t think Bernardo Kastrup exists as a true separate agency. Bernardo Kastrup is a ripple— or a metaphor I prefer— a whirlpool in the ocean of nature. It’s a process. It’s doing. It’s not a thing. It’s a Castro-ping, not a Castro. Yeah. And now, is that your intellectual mind saying that? Is that your intellectual mind saying that I don’t believe Bernardo Castro exists? That’s my intellect saying. Okay. But you don’t feel that in the moment, but you feel like that’s actually correct. So let me just say that. So sorry, what’s then you suffer? Look, conceptual understanding is not transformative. You need it to open the doors to another type of understanding because the intellect is the bouncer of the heart. So felt understanding doesn’t come through if your intellect is saying, “That’s not plausible,” or, “That is impossible in principle.” So you need an intellectual discourse in order to allow your intellect to relax and give yourself permission to have a different kind of understanding. But if you don’t intellectually grant yourself permission to do that, you’re screwed. So that’s my fight. I’m trying to give people— I’m trying to help people give themselves intellectual permission to contemplate other things than what rationalist materialism would accept, consider acceptable or not. But ultimately, it’s direct embodied experience that is transformative. And I’m keenly aware of that. Do you have any free will? I don’t think Bernardo Kastrup really exists. How can it have free will if it’s not there? If free will is Bernardo Kastrup can choose against nature, because Bernardo Kastrup is separate from nature, then of course not. There isn’t the entity there to have free will. So even the question already presupposes too much. See, this is the difference between the East and the West, broadly speaking, no? That the East seems to say, well, suffering comes from your desires, so here’s one solution: get rid of desire, get rid of will. But then the West poses the other solution, which is find something triumphant that can justify the sorrow. So what do you say to that? Is that a correct characterization of the East versus the West? I think it’s fair. I thought you were going to say find something to realize your desires. That we know is a faulty recipe. The richest people in the world also overdose on medication, get drunk, and commit suicide. Because every time you achieve a desire, it disappears. It’s like a ghost. So you have to go for the next. But once you play that 10 times, you realize that you’re not going to get anywhere. And then you kill yourself. Cool yourself. But what you said, well, you are going to suffer, find meaning instead. That is the West. That characterizes the West. And I don’t say that in a judgmental form because that’s what characterizes me. I am a— I mean, I have profound admiration for the East, more than admiration even, but I have made peace with the fact that I am a Western in mind and I will always be Western. And yes, as a Westerner, I find consolation in meaning, knowing that desires cannot be fulfilled, knowing that suffering is integral to life. It’s the thing that keeps you awake with your eyes on the ball. It’s the thing that allows us to fulfill whatever telos nature might be, which might be operating through us. If we never suffer, we will just become Epicureans. We will just enjoy life and never think about the big questions, and nature will No impetus, no goal. We will not follow any telos if we are like that. So suffering is necessary. It’s a dreadful but indispensable tool. And the way out for me is to find meaning. And in that, I am a Westerner and will always be. Yeah. How much of a solution as to how you should guide your life is to be personalized rather than adopted broadly from one tradition versus the other. And I’ll explain what I mean when you— I have to scroll down here because that’s distracting me. I have it also playing here and the chat is here and sometimes it flashes and it’s— I have a distracted, distracted mind. Okay, so I see people who are, let’s say, the New Age spiritual types, but even the Westerners who are adamant about Christianity or whatever it may be, saying, no, this is what you should think, my view. And I’m wondering, well, well, is this one pill or is it meant to be personalized like a microbiome? So the West would say to the East, what you’re doing is you’re not placing enough importance on action and you’re abnegating your own individual importance. And the East would say to the West, yeah, you’re obstinate, you’re pig-headed, and you’re refractory, you’re unwilling to give up your own ego, and that’s what you should do. So those are two different solutions. Now, should we adopt one of them? Is it a mix? Is one ultimately correct? Now, I think you’re suggesting one— the Eastern one— is actually the one that’s ultimately true in the sense that it corresponds to what the facts are. But as for how we should live our life, is it a one-size-fits-all, or is it a mix of both, or is there even a third solution we should pull from? I think the answer is always very personal. I can give you the answer that I have for myself, my answer, my truth in this regard. And I don’t think for a moment that this particular thing is an absolute truth. I think metaphysically the East has gotten it right. And it keeps popping back up even in the West. And eventually we have to confront the reality of what people in the Hinduism Hindu Valley centuries before Ahsoka, centuries before Alexander the Great came into the neighborhood and already knew. So that comes from the Hindu Valley 3,000, 3,500 years ago. And I think they got it. They nailed it. Okay. Where I wouldn’t go with the East, and that’s my personal answer where I am a Western to the bone, is that our Although I am convinced that personal agency, our personal sense of self, is an illusion, I do think it’s an illusion with a role to play. Nature has done this, all right? So how did this come about? Is there a why? Is there an instinctive why? I’m sure it’s not a premeditated plan, like the Christian God. But we’ve come to this, and everything in nature seems to be pushing in that direction. you know, evolution by natural selection, that has to be an environment conducive to that. The whole of nature seems to be pushing in that direction of self-reflective, seemingly personal conscious agents. I wouldn’t dismiss that as some kind of cosmic error that we need to grow out of. I think we need to understand what is probably ultimately truth, but without— the truth, but without dismissing the kind of experience that is made possible through the illusion of individual agency. Look, it’s through dissociation that we can contemplate the universe from a side that’s not available to God, if I’m allowed to use this word in a metaphorical sense. It is by being dissociated that we can look at God from the other side in a self-reflective manner, because self-reflection is the product of evolution by natural selection. Selection. We’ve paid a very dear price over 3.5 billion years of evolution on this planet to develop the ability to say, “I am a thinking entity.” Nature has invested a lot in this bloody affair, illusory as it may be. A lot has gone into this. So I am not dismissive of it. I am with Jung on this. I am not for dismantling the images. I am not for meditating ourselves out of existence. And coming into some mental space in which nothing really happens, becoming completely disengaged from the world, from the others. I’m not for that. I think this is all an illusion, but I think it’s an illusion worthwhile to play along with. But just keeping in mind at all times that it is an illusion. Don’t get completely taken in when you’re playing the game, but by all means do play the game. Nature has invested a bloody lot in this. We have You have to have faith, faith that there is a point. Because we have been born, we are in this extraordinarily strange condition of being alive. If there is no point to it, then soon enough you’ll be dead, then you have nothing to lose anyway, you never had anything to lose from the get-go. But in the off chance that there is an instinctive point to this, that this is pushing towards something, some desperate need, instinctual need for self-knowledge operating through us, into which nature is investing unfathomable amounts of suffering, if there is an off chance that this may be the case, I think it’s our moral duty to play the game, not to get taken in by it, but to play the game and explore the world from this perspective. Perspective. Experience your suffering. Contemplate it. Ponder about it. Now, we are in this situation, not forever. Soon enough we will not be. So take something out of it, in the off chance that there is something to be taken out of it. So in that sense, I’m not Eastern at all. I think they got it right metaphysically, but their moral truth is not my moral truth. Um, I am for playing the game, and you see that in what I’m doing. Look at me, I’m playing the game. Am I choosing to do this? No, I’m just not resisting it. I’m giving— I’m letting whatever wants to come through the world through me to come unopposed. And it took me over 10 years of holding this philosophical position I hold today for this to become something that really comes out of my bones, as opposed to an intellectual conceptual thought. So today, and I can’t tell you how much relief I feel in being able to say this with a hand on my heart and in all honesty. Today, not last year, not the year before that, not the 10 years before that, I live my philosophy. I embody it. And I feel an amount of peace today that one year ago would have been unthinkable. And what brought me to this was Suffering. 2 years ago, I almost killed myself twice because of a health condition that is incurable but will never kill me, just make me suffer beyond belief. I have a particularly hard form of tinnitus, which people say ringing in the ears, but in my case, it sounds like a dentist’s drill about 1 meter distance, one on each side. And it’s constant. Right now? Night. It’s the last thing. Right now, of course, especially when I put a headset on and I block environment sounds, then I lose auditive depth. And then I hear it constantly. It’s the last thing I hear when I fall asleep. It’s the first thing I experience when I wake up. And when this really got worse— I have had it for 8 years or 9— but when it really got worse, beginning of 2019, twice for half an an hour, the idea of killing myself was not abstract at all. It was something very, very real, very concrete in front of me, a very serious possibility that I was considering. Now, in a way, for reasons that I cannot explain, this suffering has brought me to the state of peace I am in now. So for the first time, my Philosophy, it has always been not abstract for me. I have always been a philosopher in the classical sense, in the sense that philosophy is not a job for me. It’s my guidance, is my guide to life. Yeah. So it has always been like that to me. But embodying my philosophy is very recent, and it’s with an unending amount of joy that I am able to say that to you with a hand in my heart, you know, Honesty, I have surrendered my personal self. And life has become fantastic, meaningful, pleasant. Of course, it will not last forever. At some point I’ll get sick, I will lose someone I love, as it has happened before, and it will be a whole bloody nightmare again. But look, I am in peace right now. I’ll take it. I don’t know how long it will last, but I’ll take it with gratitude. And it just makes my philosophy come to life in me and increases my commitment to it. My commitment, my core subjective commitment to it, not the commitment of Bernardo Kastrup. Bernardo Kastrup never wanted to do this, never wanted to write books, never wanted to leave the corporate world, never wanted to become a more or less known philosopher. Bernardo Kastrup wanted to be a business executive and almost actually got to that and then gave it up. IBM. Yeah, Bernardo Kastrup had other plans about the ideal partner. My partner today, my girlfriend today, is the choice of the unconscious. It’s the true choice. It’s the person that needs to be in my life. It’s the person nature wanted me to be with, in the sense that she and I are nature. Um, and it was very different before. It’s a totally different way of relating to each other, to yourself, to world, very peaceful, and everything happens naturally, effortlessly. Giving an interview to you, I’ve been speaking for 3 hours and 15 minutes, more actually, because I started recording later. I’m cognizant of your time, and I apologize. It is flowing effortlessly. That’s what I’m trying to say. It flows effortlessly. My books flow, not effortlessly. Now I confess Yes, that giving birth to a book is like giving birth. It’s painful. It wakes me up at 3 in the morning and puts me in front of this computer at 3 in the morning, even if I have to wake up at 7, go to work the next day. Every book, it’s like a cosmic responsibility. So why do you write it? Because I have to. It’s like a ball of hot iron that comes up your esophagus and you need to spit it out, and the only way to spit it out is to finish it. And now it’s easier because I don’t resist it. If that’s what’s going to come tomorrow, then that’s what’s going to be. And so let it be. So there is freedom in what philosophers of old would say, the slavery to the daimon. And the daimon is that superior force that forces you to do things in life as a philosopher. Oh, daimon. Okay. Daimon. Aristotle had a daimon or daemon, depends on I’m sorry for the spelling. Aristotle had a daemon who told him what not to do. There are other philosophers who have a daemon. Socrates, sorry. And there are other philosophers that have a daemon that tell them what to do. So surrendering to slavery towards my daemon has been the ultimate freedom. So the freedom is not the ego winning over, stealing the god from the fire, stealing the fire from the god. Gods and making the universe what it wants to be. That’s impossible, because the ego doesn’t even exist. It’s a psychological configuration. It’s a psychological phenomenon in the pejorative sense of the meaning. Meaning it’s not really there. It’s just something your mind is making up. That’s what it is. So how can it control the world? It’s not really there to begin with. How can something that doesn’t exist control what does does exist. So freedom for me has not been achieved through the mastery of control, although I thought I had mastered control by the time I was 34. I was the youngest, I think I was the youngest executive in my company, which is one of the top 50 companies in Europe. It is not a small company at all. Congratulations. I’m not going to name the company, but a very, very, very large and important company. If that company ceased to exist tomorrow, you would have no new phones, computers, or iPads for at least 5 years, probably 10. So I had that illusion when I was 34. Now I control life. Now I have money, I have a beautiful house, I have a beautiful wife, a great job, I have power. You had a wife before you were married? I had a wife before I had my current partner. Yeah. And my ex-wife is still a very close friend. We are not enemies at all. Country, but we’re not married anymore. And then it’s like instantly after I got that promotion and bought the house in which I live today, which for Dutch standards is a wonderful, large, expensive house, and that I thought, okay, now I arrived. Now I have control. I have the house, I have the wife, I have the money, I have the position, the power, I have everything. And then it’s amazing how life immediately cuts your bullshit short. Short, right? Um, through illness. Um, I thought— well, my wife then and I discovered a, a mass in her breast, and it took 2 weeks for the doctors to confirm that it was benign. It was nothing to worry about. But during those 2 weeks, we lived with the reality that it was probably cancer. And that was nature telling me, you think you’re in control? ‘Just because you have a high position, a beautiful house, and money in the bank, let me show you what control is. I would take from you what you care most about, or at least I will have you think that I would take from you what you care most about.’ And at the end of the day, it was not cancer. She’s alive and healthy today. But the message, the message was not lost on me. We are never, ever in control. We don’t even exist, let alone be in control. You are never in control. You are like a mayfly. You are an ephemeral little doing of nature that will stop being done in no time. Before you even think, boom, it’s over. Thank you. You have absolutely no control, buddy. And if you think you have, you’re in for a lot of disappointment and suffering. And the freedom I found was in, hey, embracing this. Bernardo doesn’t even exist. Of course he’s not in control. I am a doing. I am a process. Something wants to manifest through this doing. And as the doing, I’m not going to resist it. I’ll let it through. And look, if it works, great. If it doesn’t work, it’s not my problem either. Because the same argument that tells tells you you’re not in control also tells you you do not really have ultimate responsibility. That’s not a license for immoral or dysfunctional behavior. That’s not a license for dysfunctional behavior or criminal behavior. Let me repeat it. It’s not a license for that. It just tells you if you regret anything, you’re deluding yourself because you didn’t choose what you regret either. Something worked through you. Something needed to happen through your actions. So, you know, the illusion of control is as much an illusion, and for the same reasons, of the illusion of regret. So— Yeah, I don’t understand that last point about regret. You can only regret things if you think you really had a choice and you made the wrong one. Right. Now, if you understand that there was a natural process and coding, of which the thing you consider to be yourself was just a small part, and that the boundaries between that and the rest, it’s just a narrative in your head. Yeah. And a mental configuration that is conducive to that narrative. Then no regret. What is there to regret? It’s not your show. See what I mean? This is where I’m thinking about what’s the confluence between the Judeo-Christian ethic and then the East, and I see overlap, and then I see sincerity. So one is the surrendering. There’s— that seems to be common to all religions. Now in Christianity, it’s like surrender to the truth, and that’s something I try. I try. Yeah, but Jesus is synonymous with the truth and love. Yeah, exactly. Jesus is the word, the logos. So surrender to Jesus seems like something very concrete and personal. It’s saying the same thing that the Eastern guys are saying. All there is is the void. You don’t even exist. It’s the same bloody thing. But even the rational rationalists too, where the rationalists talk about, well, all I follow is logic. Well, the root word of logic is logos, and you hear what they say about logic, it’s almost equivalent to what Christians have to say about Jesus. That is, it’s, it’s all perv— oh God, it’s all-pervading. You can’t— it’s a natural order, you cannot go against it. Okay, well, you can go against it actually, but you, you’re— it’s deleterious if you go against it. Just like some rationalists say, well, that’s illogical, dismiss that. Okay, so then the surrendering to the truth. Okay, that’s, that’s something I try, I try to live my life by. I do, I do like that. I do like, I, I hope that I do live that, live by that. And, and then the truth has to be selected by something. What I mean by that is that there’s an infinite amount of truths to choose from, so you have to have some selection mechanism. And then that selection mechanism has to be, well, I conceptualize it as love. So of all the truths— so here’s one way of talking about it. Someone close to me said, I wanted to tell my partner she’s as cold as a rock, something like that. And then I was thinking, well, you shouldn’t say that. And then I think I said that, then he said, but it’s true. And it’s like, well, it is true because she is cold. She is as cold as a rock, but it’s not loving. And there’s plenty you could say, so why would you select that one? Okay, so there’s that. You surrender to the truth. I like that. And then in Christianity, there is an emphasis on, on slavery in the sense that be a slave to a higher master, and then that can obviously get distorted and being used for actual slavery. You nailed it, right? You nailed it. You hit it in the head in your first words. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Okay, but then here’s the difference. You said regret, and regret is something that we did not choose. But in the Christian ethic, I would imagine for your choices. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, you choose correctly and you can regret, and that’s fine. Don’t make that same mistake again. And as long as you don’t make it again, Jesus forgives. As long as you want to live your life by not making that mistake again, that’s forgiveness. You don’t need to regret it. If you regret it, well, who are you to even regret it? Jesus forgives you. You know better than Jesus. So in some way you can let go of regret like that. So it’s complementary, but then the East and the West. But then I see What are the differences? I think all religious traditions that have moved a significant number of people in our history, they have the power they have, the power to compel people to move in a certain way. They have that power because they are touching on something true, although amenable to wild misinterpretations. Interpretation. But at the source, it’s pure. At the source, it is the truth. And what you just said in Christianity, it’s all about surrendering to a higher power. And that’s exactly— I can recognize what happened in my life over the past year as an instance of that, because by admitting and facing the reality that Bernardo Kastrup not only is not in control, has never been, but is not really even there. That was my freedom. It’s this recognition that is freeing, not the freedom of control, but the freedom of surrender, surrendering to a higher power. And that higher power is what I really am. It’s nature as it wants to manifest through me. So I recognize the Christian surrendering to yourself. You’re surrendering to what you actually are, your natural self, as opposed to your adaptive self, your social, socially adaptive self, because it sounds selfish, it sounds narcissistic, like I’m surrendering to myself, I’ll do what I will. But the opposite— yeah, it’s the precise opposite of that. So why do you think— sorry to interrupt, but this is like— and I know you gotta go, man, like I’ve kept you on for way too long, and I’m like, I should get going at some point too. But why do you think it is that the East managed to get the metaphysics correct? It’s an older culture. Chance. Yeah, I know, but what is it about the question, right? This is a dangerous path because it starts getting into, you know, do different so-called races have different potentials? And I don’t even acknowledge scientifically the existence of a race, so I’m not going to say that there’s something special about the peoples of the subcontinent. I don’t think that would be a statement I would espouse, but I do recognize that for whatever reason it has happened there, and the true understanding of it still seems to occur more often there to this darn day. Now, I will not offer you an explanation along genetic lines of superiority or anything, because I don’t believe in this kind of explanations. But yeah, it’s a confluence in nature that happened to happen there and still happening there. And you might think, well, it’s a long time for it to be just a confluence. It’s not. It’s 3,500 years. It’s the blink of an eye. It’s less than the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing. And it may be different next time around. I don’t know. We will not be around in this form to see that in this form. So I do not know why there. That period of time is called the Axial Age. And it’s a mystery why then and why in many parts of the world, but particularly stronger than anywhere else and arguably truer than anywhere else, that this happened in the Hindu Valley. And the only explanation I can conceive is it’s another culture, which is true. It’s another culture where the subcontinent was when Europe was in the Dark Ages. It’s not a very flattering comparison for Europe. You’re talking about -3000 BC? No, I’m talking about already the Dark Ages in Europe, you know, the period between 400 and 1400 when intellectual development stopped in Europe, social development stopped, and Europe was in the Dark Ages. In the subcontinent, it was not dark. In the Muslim world, it was not dark either. Actually, it was a sort of renaissance of arts, crafts, and science in the Muslim world. So the torch of wisdom and intellectual development is handed over across the world in different epochs. I do acknowledge that metaphysical understanding seems to particularly correlate with the subcontinent, for whatever reason. I don’t know. I don’t know. I would tell you this. If I were someone from the subcontinent— you are from the subcontinent, aren’t you? Your surname. My background is West Indian. So I’m from Trinidad and then I am an immigrant to Toronto. So I came here when I was a baby. Yeah. Okay. So you have that background. If I had that background, I would not— how will I get across by saying that? If I had that background, I would be proud. Oh, that’s nice. I’ll put it that way. That doesn’t mean that I intellectually think that the races are superior. I think this is nonsense. I don’t think there are any races. Yeah, I wasn’t going to go there. Well, what I was wondering is, so one explanation is by chance. And the reason it’s by chance is we can say that it’s been around for 3,000 years, so it can’t be by chance because that’s too long. But then at the same time, time is relative. It’s a blink in the eye. Who knows? Another roll of the dice, maybe African culture would have come up with Christianity and vice versa and so on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. It’s not only that it arose there. I mean, it popped elsewhere. It popped in Western culture as well. Parmenides argued he was an idealist if you interpret him correctly as— Is that a pre-Socratic? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I don’t know. Sounds like a pre-Socratic. It popped elsewhere. So it’s not exclusive to the subcontinent. What makes the subcontinent special is that it was conducive to its spread and adoption. Instead of popping in the minds of one and another and then disappearing like in the West, there it popped and took hold. So there was an easier recognition of that. And yeah, was that cultural? I don’t know. It predates Ahsoka, so you can’t even make historical arguments about the alignment of philosophy and state power because it precedes that. So I don’t know. I don’t know. Okay, I know you gotta get going, so how about I just read to you a few questions and then you answer them quickly? Because there are some audience questions. So one, you mentioned that materialism, if we guide ourselves by that, we’re doomed. I’m curious, is there no case to be made for ethics under materialism, like some would say, like Marxists? I think, uh, I think morals and ethics are, are practical, useful constructs, and there is just as good a case for a functional moral and ethics under materialism as there is under any any other metaphysics. So yes, I don’t think an argument against materialism is that it’s not conducive to ethics. I don’t think that is true. I think we can live ethically and morally also under materialism. I think materialism is killing for meaning, for our sense of meaning, and for our understanding of our place in nature. Materialism is killing for that. It’s a nihilistic philosophy, but it’s not a philosophy that makes functional morals and ethics impossible. I don’t think that is the case, and I think it’s a fallacious argument against materialism. In other words, I don’t think a materialist is necessarily a bad person. What is the weakest point of your theory/worldview? So that is, if someone was to put a crack in it, where would they most likely to be successful putting a crack in? It’s an explicit conceptual account of exactly what dissociation is. We know it exists because of empirical for reasons. It is happening. We have neuroimaging studies of persons with dissociation, people with dissociation. We know the dreams they report, that they can experience the dreams from different points of view depending on the alter. So we know that the process exists that is necessary to explain nature. So it is there, we know empirically, but we do not have an explicit, completely internally consistent conceptual account of it. That’s the weakest point. I would say that’s not a reason to reject idealism, because whether we have a conceptual account of it or not, we know the process exists. So this is an epistemic question with very little force. You know, whether we can, whether we can account for it, for it or not, we know it exists. Accountability is an issue when you’re postulating things that you don’t know whether they exist or not. Then you have to describe them explicitly and completely for us to check the plausibility of it. But when nature is already showing us this happens, that’s all we need. But I would admit that we lack a complete and internally consistent conceptual account of exactly what dissociation is. What makes something living versus not? Conscious versus not? So is a brick alive? And how do we have a way of drawing that boundary? Is there something special about biological life? Why? What are the conditions? You just mentioned this, right? Like, what are the conditions for the sophisticated dissociation? Dissociation, let’s say. I think all biology is the image of a dissociative process in the natural mind, so to say, or universal consciousness, if I want to— if I use some terms co-opted by the New Age. Um, I think all matter is the image of inner mental processes. The question is what counts as a dissociated alter and what is just part of the rest of mind at large as a whole, because mind at large technically is also an alter. In other words, after you eliminate every living being, what remains is itself an alter because it’s dissociated from the living beings. So if there is a dissociative boundary, there is an alter, and any boundary divides the space in two. So when you have a boundary, you have at least two alters already. So at the birth of the first living being in the history of the universe, there were two alters, the living being and all the rest, which was dissociated from the living being. Dissociation is two ways. To stop you, I’m trying to understand. You’re making a distinction between living and mind. So can you experience without living? Yes, I think the rest of the universe, the inanimate universe, everything that remains after you remove every living being, everything that remains is its itself a conscious entity. Okay, Bernardo, sorry, I’m trying to understand. Forgive me if I just keep interrupting. Okay. Are you making a connection between living beings and self-conscious beings, or are those two separate? Like, yes, I think only the alters that correspond to living beings have developed self-consciousness because you need evolution by natural selection in the framework of a planetary ecosystem. System for this to evolve. So I don’t think mind at large— in other words, the parts of universal consciousness that are dissociated from all living beings, what remains of the universe after you account for all living beings— I don’t think mind at large is self-conscious because it didn’t undergo the pressures of natural selection in a planetary ecosystem. It had no reason to need to evolve that higher-order mental ability. But I think it is conscious because all there is is consciousness. And you may call it God if you want. It’s certainly omnipresent and probably omniscient, even though not, not self-reflective, and also omnipotent, although not in a premeditated way. So I’m fine if you want to call that God with the caveat that that’s what I mean by the word God and not anything else. And it is conscious. Too. So, and what does it look like from our perspective? It looks like the inanimate universe. Stars, galaxies, quasars, black holes, moons, asteroids— everything that is non-living around us is the body of Mind at Large. In other words, it’s what the innermentation of Mind at Large looks like when observed from across our dissociative boundary. It’s what the mental inner life of Mind at Large looks like to us in the dashboard of our sensory organs. So all matter is just the image of conscious inner life, whether it corresponds to a living being or not. And here I’m restricting the term life to dissociated alters. And the inanimate universe, in that sense, is not alive because it’s not an organism, but it has mental inner life, conscious inner life. And now I’m using the word life in a broader sense. It is conscious, but it’s not a living organism in the restrictive definition of a living organism as something that metabolizes. The inanimate universe does not metabolize, but I do think it has conscious inner life, and that the matter of the inanimate universe is what that conscious inner life looks like in the dashboard of the dials that we use to collect information from what’s outside our alter, on the other side of our dissociative boundary. So, um, everything betrays the presence of consciousness, literally everything. The question is, is what betrays the presence of dissociated conscious processes? Then I would say only living beings do that. This bottle does not have a conscious inner life in and of itself the way you have a conscious inner life in and of itself. I think this bottle is part of the broad image we call the inanimate universe, and the inanimate universe is conscious as a whole. In other words, there is no bottle. It’s a linguistic differentiation we make. The only ontologically distinct things are living beings. Why? Because I feel if I pinch my skin and I don’t feel it if I pinch my screen. So there is an ontological boundary defining my alter, and that is the boundaries of what I can directly feel. I don’t feel photons hitting against the wall, but I feel photons hitting against my retina. So there is an ontic way to say this is something separate. But we do not have any reason to pronounce that the car is separate, that the road is separate, that the empty bottle of water is separate. These are linguistic distinctions. We call it nominal separations. They are merely nominal. We apply these for convenience so we can communicate more easily. If I want to buy you buy a car. Pragmatic. But the car is continuous with the rest of the inanimate universe. If you take away the road and the gravity that pulls the car against the road, the car doesn’t go anywhere, it doesn’t move. If you take away the air that allows for combustion in the engine, it doesn’t even fire. So there is no proper grounds for distinguishing between inanimate objects. So if you ask me, does the bottle have a conscious inner life of its own? I would say no, because the bottle isn’t even It’s a nominal distinction we make. There is only the inanimate universe as a whole. And that, yes, that has a conscious inner life of its own dissociated from us. What type of logic do you subscribe to? Classical, intuitionist, so on and so forth? I am an intuitionist. I think the law of excluded middle, although seems to be very intuitive, it is not well formed. I think it doesn’t survive proper scrutiny. I think existence can only be demonstrated by the production of an example of that which you want to say exists, as opposed to abstractly proving the impossibility of non-existence. If you use the words intuitionist, then you know what I’m talking about. Maybe for the benefit of the audience, the law of excluded middle says that either something is true or false. It cannot be both. Either something exists or it doesn’t exist. It cannot do both. So by proving that something cannot be false, you indirectly prove it to be true. That’s Aristotelian logic. If you reject the law of excluded middle, then proving the impossibility of something being false does not prove that it’s true. An intuitionist would say you can only prove it to be true if you produce an instance of it, if you construct it. And I think that that’s what is ultimately true. Mind at large does not follow the law of excluded middle. I think you see now people who undergo experiences of altered states, they come back and say, “That was completely illogical, but so real.” What they are referring to is that the law of excluded middle didn’t apply, so Aristotelian logic did wouldn’t apply. But things exist by virtue of an instance of them being produced. In other words, things only exist when they actually exist, as opposed to their abstract non-existence being disproven according to some conceptual system, formal system. So I reject that, and I’m an intuitionist. Yeah, not to lower in estimation your suffering from tinnitus, but there— if you think that’s bad, try having a math professor who’s an intuitionist logic person making you construct from scratch and not allow proofs by contradiction. There you go. Okay, so you also mentioned one time when you were talking to Steve Patterson from Patterson Pursuits, or Patterson in Pursuit, that what we’re doing right now, me and you, we’re speaking in the domain of rationality and reason and logic evidence, so on, so on. Rupert Spira, who you spoke— who you would speak to, wouldn’t even buy into that game. You’re playing in a different arena. But you said that what I’m doing Or sorry, you said that what you’re doing is— this is the norm, so you have to play in this game, but you ultimately believe it’s incomplete and this is not the game we should be playing. So to make an analogy, it would be like you’re trying to best someone at soccer to show them that basketball is better. So then what I’m wondering is, okay, so what is the game of all games? The game of all games is knowledge by acquaintance, not knowledge by conceptual conceptualization. Concepts only point at something, but they are not the thing they are pointing at. Right. So to know the truth conceptually means that you know the direction it’s pointing to, but you’re not acquainted with the truth until it’s embodied. So you may be convinced that something is true, but it’s not in your body and doesn’t change your life and doesn’t make you feel differently. So you may be intellectually convinced materialism is false, but you still make I dread the oblivion of your consciousness coming upon death. In other words, you didn’t embody your intellectual conclusion. What’s governing your emotional life? It’s something else. It’s not your intellectual conclusion. The conclusion didn’t sink from here down to the emotional self. So it’s not really transformative. It’s not guiding your life. Now, I play purely an intellectual game. Rupert Spira— Rupert plays the game of embodied truth. He’s not trying to convince you intellectually at all. He completely bypasses that. He neglects that. He’s trying to bring you truth by acquaintance. In other words, if you experience oneness, you do not need a narrative that tells you that oneness is true. You’ve been there. It’s in you. No, you short-circuit it. You bypass it. That’s his game. And it’s the only game that is truly transformative, that will really change your life. Everything else is in the head. It doesn’t sink into the rest. So why do I play the intellectual game? Intellectual game. Because I think that a lot of people who are perfectly capable of knowing the truth by acquaintance, and who would have known the truth by acquaintance, don’t, because their intellect is the bouncer of their heart. They will not give themselves permission to be acquainted with what’s true, because the intellect is telling them, “No, this cannot be true.” And that’s that evil little voice, like, “This cannot be true. It cannot be the case. So it’s not. And that closes you up and it amputates a huge part of your mind, of your capability to experience what’s actually going on. It is shut off by an intellectual conclusion, which is not in itself transformative, but it can amputate the degrees of freedom that your true inner life, your emotion inner life, would otherwise have. It cuts up the map and offers you a much more restricted territory that you can explore. And makes you blind and inaccessible to the rest. And therefore it precludes you from becoming acquainted with what is true, because you don’t give yourself intellectual permission to become acquainted with it. So I play the intellectual game because I want to help people give themselves intellectual permission to explore the fullness of their nature as living beings, as dissociated alters, because the dissociated alter, while it’s alive, it’s dissociated, but even in that state of dissociation, disassociation, it can become acquainted with things that our mainstream cultural narrative categorically today says are either impossible or, if they actually happen, illusory and therefore should be dismissed and not taken seriously. And that is the greatest tragedy of our age, that not only do we know where the solutions lie, but that we actually every now and then experience the solution, but dismiss it because of this pernicious cultural narrative that tells us what can and cannot be true. You mentioned— you had a great phrase, I don’t know if you just came up with it— the intellectual side is the bouncer of the heart. Yeah, I often use this. Okay, that’s a great one. I haven’t heard that. Now, should the heart be the ultimate adjudicator? That is, don’t let the authoritative judgment go to the intellect, but only let it be the heart? Is there a mix? And then what decides what is that mix? Something above both heart and intellect? The heart is a metaphor. What I mean is your true emotional life, how you actually feel, irrespective of what you think you should be feeling. You see what I mean? We often tell ourselves, well, my life is great. Everything is in order. And yet I’m massively depressed. And you can’t pin it down. Your intellect doesn’t have an answer because according to the intellect, everything is okay. But your true feelings are what counts. They are your true self. The intellect is a construct on on top of it. Your emotions are the foundation, and they are ultimately your real life, and you cannot escape that. So the heart is a metaphor for that. Maybe more than that, maybe the heart is the image of that particular part, that particular configuration of mind. But— Well, that wouldn’t— I mean, technically, that wouldn’t be the case unless you want to make a case that people with pacemakers lack— Well, people with an artificial heart. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, art is a metaphor for your true emotional inner life. And then you say, well, should that be the judge? I would say the question is unnecessary because it is how you feel. So you don’t really have a choice there. Do I choose to feel that way or not? And that’s our dilemma. We think the intellect has a choice, has a say on that. That if we tell ourselves, I achieved everything I wanted, so I should be happy, and therefore I am happy. Well, guess what? You don’t get to choose. You may achieve everything you think you wanted, and you still may be massively depressed inside, because the life you truly live is the life of how you feel, not the life of what you think. So, you know, in that sense, the heart is the master, whether you admit it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you can rationalize it or not. You are living your your heart. By definition, what you live is your heart, not what you think. When the intellect is in charge, quote unquote, it’s because the heart let it be. No. Well, it’s never in charge. You always feel the way you feel regardless of what you think about it. But I’m taking this bouncer analogy too far then. That— no, no, no, no, no. You feel the way you feel, but you could feel differently if only your intellect would give you permission to experience that other thing. So the intellect is a filter, but it’s not how you feel. You feel the way you feel. What your intellect thinks may correlate with how you feel, but that correlation usually works the way— it usually works the way around. You feel the way you feel, and then you look for an intellectual explanation for why you feel the way you feel. Yeah, but the other way around doesn’t work. You can’t tell yourself to be happy. You can’t convince yourself that you are happy. But if you are unhappy and you could come out of unhappiness by exploring a previously unknown room in the mansion of your mind, the intellect may— the intellect doesn’t really close that door to you, but it convinces you that it’s unnecessary to open it. Was there a moment or an insight that brought you from that place of suffering that you experienced about a year to 3 years ago to now, or was it a gradual process? Gradual process. Yeah. It happens under your nose. You can only see it in hindsight. You look back and, oh, I have been feeling different for a few months now. Oh, interesting. How is it that you get your ideas written? Sorry, how is it that you formulate your ideas? For me, writing is something that I have to force myself to do in the sense that I made it a habit. So now I do it each morning, but I had to tell myself to do that. Ideas come to me somewhat naturally and I just write it down on my, on my phone so that they just spew out at any moment. Even right now, it’s, it’s frantic, but writing itself is a, it’s a chore. I have to force myself to do it. So how is it that you write and formulate your idea? Sorry, what I’m trying to say is, do your ideas come almost ready-made and then it’s just a matter of typing them out, or does the writing process help clarify, refine? And what does that look like? Is it just you rewriting? You re— you just— you vomited out onto the paper at first and then you fix the mess? Like, pretty much, please take me through your process process of writing? It’s not a choice. It doesn’t happen at the time or form of my choosing. So the ideas just come with an overwhelming force that makes me feel very small. But the writing process does help articulate the ideas in words. It helps me tell what it is that I think I know. You know what I mean? Because it’s one thing to have an understanding, and it’s another thing entirely different to tell yourself in words what it is that you think you understand. So the ideas come as that instantaneous understanding. Boom! There may be 3 volumes in that, but I cannot tell myself what it it is that I understood until I go through the writing process. Ah, that’s super interesting because to me, I wouldn’t phrase it like that. I would say that I don’t understand it until I can write it out and reread it and then it makes sense. Like, to me, I can feel like I understood it, but it’s an amorphous mess of intuition. And that’s— and I guess what you’re doing is you’re listening to your heart. You’re saying, well, you intuited, you’re correct. And I’m saying, no, I could be wrong. It’s not even a choice because as I’m writing, the reason I say that the idea comes all formed is that if I immediately start writing, I know in an overwhelming way whether what I am writing is correct or not. In other words, whether— Before you write it? During the writing. I’m writing, if I get too lost in my thoughts and I lose contact with the original idea that is still sitting like a ball of hot iron somewhere here, if I deviate from that, very quickly I read what I wrote and I go, “No, no, that’s not it. That’s not it.” So the reference is always there from the beginning. It’s like I always know whether I wrote bullshit or whether I wrote something that does just justice to that intuition. That’s what leads me to tell you that the knowledge is there from moment zero, because I can always compare that against that feeling and know whether I’m writing nonsense or whether I’m doing justice to it. So from that point on, the work becomes one of labor. It’s giving words to it, but it helps me reconcile myself with that thing that comes, because it allows me to tell myself in words what it is that I think I understood. You know what I mean? And for me, as an ego, this wording to myself of what I think I understand is very important. For as long as I’m not able to do that, I feel an enormous urgency that doesn’t let me sleep, doesn’t let me focus on anything else in life. I only buy my myself out of that. I only buy my freedom once it’s all laid out in words, and then I feel like I’ve been released. It’s like someone was holding a leash. I was leashed, and once I do that, I get my ticket to freedom, and I’m let go until the next book comes. So it’s not glamorous at all. It’s not spiritual, you know what I mean? It’s not this romantic vision we have about the muse and the intuition and something coming to the world through you. Well, guess what? That’s exactly what happens. Something comes to the world through you. You are an instrument. But there is nothing romantic about it. It’s gritty. It’s sweaty. It’s cruel. Not glamorous, not romantic, not spiritual. It’s like you just want to get rid of that ball of hot iron. You want to vomit it out and be rid of it and be free for a little while until the next one comes. That has always been my relationship with my writing. The impression I have is that this stuff is not me at all. This stuff is there, pregnant, somewhere in the framework behind space and time. It’s sitting there and it wants to erupt, like it wants to go through a volcano, like the lava building pressure underneath. It wants to erupt, but it doesn’t find a channel. Know what I mean? Interesting. And then I just happen to pass by and going about my business and then, “Oh, that guy, that guy, Wudu, he has some conceptual armor that will allow the translation of this hot iron, this hot lava stuff,” which was a metaphor Jung himself used, “this lava stuff, he would be able to give it words.” So that’s the instrument. So, no, put him on a leash, don’t let him go, he will be our slave now. that I’m speaking metaphorically, but that’s how it feels. Like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I got caught. And now I’m stuck. Just because you have the right preconditions for it. So the way that I’m making an analogy in my head is not with a volcano, but with lightning. And it has some charges built up, some potential, and now it’s looking for some place where it can release it. Yeah, the place of least resistance. And it hurts you. Yeah, and it was me. Something about my back background, computer engineering, artificial intelligence on the one hand, but a lot of philosophical receptive on the other, lived in 4 countries, thinking 3 languages. Something about that probably made me the path of least resistance for lightning. And then it struck through me. Now, look, the metaphor is great in this sense. It doesn’t feel good to have lightning pass through you. No, I can imagine. It feels horrible. And again, only this year I made peace with it. I stopped fighting it. I stopped thinking of it as this responsibility I didn’t want to have, this, this, this thing that makes me unable to enjoy life. It gives me meaning, and I’m eternally grateful for that. My life never lacks meaning, and that’s the most important thing. But it has not been pleasant for the longest of times. And making peace with that, and that’s what I call the freedom of the the slave. When the slave finds his freedom in a 2x2 meter cubicle without a window, now you’re free, man. Nobody can take that freedom from you. If you find that freedom as a slave, leeched in a cubicle without a window, if you find it there, it can never be taken away from you. And I’m glowing about it now because it’s so recent. I’m sure I’ll be very cynical about it a couple of years from from now and life will be rotten again and somebody will get cancer or I will lose somebody I love and it will be shit again. But right now I’m glowing because I found the freedom of the slave. I stopped pulling on the leash so I don’t get hurt anymore. And by you doing so— see, Carl Jung, when you read— you’ve read Jung 3 times. I’ve barely read a percentage of his work because it’s so difficult. But when you read Jung, almost every other sentence is like a perfect quotation. And he had one that I try to live my life by. See, I used to be— and I still am— but I used to be much, much, much more egotistical and arrogant and think that, much like you when you were 34 and on top of the world and owning a company— I’m not saying that you were anywhere near as megalomaniacal as I am, or was, But, but I would, I would think that I want to change the world, and I would think of myself as such a, a savior. It has such a savior complex, like, I’m gonna end suffering, I’m gonna, I’m gonna solve global warming and, and even stop animals from harming each other and give clean water to the rest of the world. Some part of that, there’s a good motivation, but a large part of it was unconsciously, I want to be worshiped as the savior. I want people to come to me and say thank you so so much, Kurt. And that was, that was hard for me to admit. It’s even hard for me to admit right now, saying it out loud. Carl Jung said that you can’t— in some ways, see, this is what’s so tricky about it. It’s like Carl Jung would say you can’t save someone, but then that means like, well, what if they’re dying on the ocean? You’re not going to pull them out? What if someone’s on fire? Well, it’s more like psychologically you can’t save someone. You could only carry your own cross, and hopefully by example you show them how to burden theirs. Yes, that’s pathan. So yeah, hopefully some of what I’m doing with this podcast, even with talking to you and admitting my faults and, and, and my— me saying that I don’t know, me not knowing much and trying to understand these variegated fields and philosophies and fix myself in the process Hopefully I can shoulder my cross and maybe some people can find some example in that. Curt, if I may tell you something from the heart, I don’t know how you will receive it. It would have helped me when I was in a similar spot. So I’ll tell you what would have helped me, which doesn’t mean that it will help you at all. I would say this, my mature self would say this to my less mature self. Yourself. Don’t make it too complicated. Just don’t take yourself too seriously. It is not all about you. You are not the sum total of what’s going on. If you don’t see the meaning, don’t worry about it. You don’t need to. You are immersed in an infinite ocean of mystery which is touching your skin right now, and you cannot escape it. There are things that you would want to know and you can’t even articulate the question. And you’re immersed in it. It’s hugging you at all times, whether you want it or not. It’s right on the other side of your skin. It is what you are ultimately. So just relax. Don’t take yourself too seriously. What’s going on is beyond what your little human rational your mind can ever corral in a little story. And you’ve got to have faith in the true religious sense, which is trust that that which you don’t know and you’re immersed in, all this mystery, is going somewhere worthwhile. And if it’s not, there’s nothing to lose. So there’s no price to be paid for being wrong regarding this. So you might as well have faith. Don’t take yourself too seriously and just have faith. It will go the way it will go, then it will be fine. Thank you. Even in that, like, not to put up some resistance, but even in that, you have some conviction. You know what you’re saying and you believe it, which means you have a framework through which to interpret the world, even if that framework has as a part of it that I can never know or comprehend the vast majority of it. I think my biggest knowledge is knowing what I don’t know. Oh no, not even that, because not even I know is knowing how much I don’t know. And there is freedom in recognizing that, because a lot of anxiety and nihilism has to do with a certain narrative about what things are. And you think you know them, and that’s what’s confining. That’s what is so crushing. When you think you know and you think the mystery is off the table, when you think that the air you’re breathing right now has been fully explained, explained. Each molecule in the air you’re breathing is a mystery of unfathomable depth, and it’s percolating through your body right now. So the ego thinks it will find freedom by controlling and knowing, while freedom is found in being aware of how much you do not know and allowing it to play out. In other words, I’m not saying this because I know a lot. I’m saying this because I am more aware now of how much I don’t know than I was before. I thought I knew a whole bunch of stuff. Now I know that what I think I knew— what I thought I know— sorry, what I thought I knew is just images, phantasms, representations, appearances, how things present themselves to me, not what they are in and of themselves. Themselves. I’ve realized that what my sensorium gives me is a dashboard, not a clear glass window into what is out there. And when you realize that, every lightning strike is a mystery of cosmic proportions, of a divine nature, let alone quasars and black holes. It brings you to tears. A dark cloud in the sky is enough to move you to —to use the Christian language—to throw yourselves to your knees and thank God for existence. This realization of the unfathomable mystery that is surrounding and caressing you, for lack of a better word, at all times, it is that unknowing, that lack of control, that acceptance of our slavery condition as natural processes that don’t really exist, but through which nature expresses something. It is this unknowing, lack of control and acceptance that, at least for me, that has bought me some temporary freedom. For all I know, after we stop this conversation, I will get a phone call that will destroy my life, and I will want to kill myself. For all I know, that will be the case. But right now, that’s It’s my freedom. Why did you laugh right there when you said, for all I know, I’ll get a phone call and it’ll destroy my life? And then you like, haha. Now, Freud would say that that’s indicative of something unconscious, but I’m sure that that’s— I’m reading too much into it. Like, I’m thinking too much, but I’m curious. It was irony. It’s the irony of knowing that morals are human constructs, just like our sense of fairness, that in nature there is no such a thing as justice and fairness. I’m just such a selfish person, Bernard. Like, I— it’s so— no, I mean, like, I’m almost like confessing, like, if it’s a— like, if you’re a priest. I, I wish I had the peace that— now see, what’s so tricky about this is that I’m also being overly hard on myself, partly because I want to just express the worst parts, worst parts of me, because I’m somewhat afraid of, of seeming arrogant and expressing the parts of me that I, I find that I’m proud of. So for example, each year of my life since I was 26 has just gotten progressively better and better and better. And I’m married and I love my life. And I find like every— I love work. I love, love, love, love work. Like I love talking to you, love talking to you. I love studying to talk to you. I love studying to talk to other people. I love talking to those. I love my wife. And I’m so fortunate that all I have in my life is my clean apartment, like my clean condo, super clean. I have ataxiophobia, so I don’t like disorderliness or untidiness, and everything’s in its own place. I have a Toyota Corolla, like a 2021 hybrid Toyota. I love my Toyota Corolla. To some people it’s like, oh, who cares about that? Oh, I love it. Love, love everything about my life. I feel like almost each moment is imbued with such meaning. So when I say that I’m a selfish person and I, and I express that I am lacking in some way, I, I I’m not falling apart, but I think I come across, or I let that part of me be seen more readily because I’m afraid of seeming like I have it all together and seeming arrogant. And I’m— there’s a part of me that’s so afraid of that. And I— well, I’m just confessing. I don’t have a question formulated around that. You’re being human. And you said that, yes, I take myself too seriously. So like, okay, I don’t think I do, but I’m sure I do, because you’re wiser than I am, and you must see it. And so— If you’re worried about what other people think of you, you’re taking yourself too seriously. If it would destroy your life to be humiliated in public, you’re taking yourself too seriously. Because for nature, it’s just a natural process unfolding. Everything else is a narrative we play base on it, a value-based judgment of our own invention. And that’s why that little cynical— ironic laugh I gave, because, you know, when you get to the point where I am, there is a temptation to say, I’ve gone through shit, now I’ve arrived in a place of peace. It would be unfair if this were taken from me now. It’s a cosmic giggle. It would be taken from you next second if that’s how nature wants to unfold. There is no such a thing as justice. There is only a conceptualization of people who take themselves too seriously. Now, that doesn’t mean that I want to defend myself or my girlfriend if somebody threatens her safety. I will kill to defend her. So I will act to preserve my functional status. I will act to preserve my life, my security, my comfort. But that too is a natural process. I will not be doing that out of some sense of intrinsic cosmic justice and God as a judge that will pass judgment fairly across all involved. I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think nature can be just as cruel and ironic as any human being can. So that’s why I I had that little ironic giggle because I’m in a good place right now, but I’m keenly aware the carpet can be pulled off my feet 30 seconds from now. I may get a phone call, you know, destroy my world. You have such a great, great, great outlook. And see, for me, I’ve been so humiliated and humbled, and I don’t, I don’t particularly mind public humiliation, and I’ve I’ve done enough self-development to overcome some of that, where you just do push-ups on the street or you yell for no reason or whatever it may be. But maybe a part of my background anxiety is the fact that I either, one, feel bad that I have such a great, great, great, great, great life, and that not only is there so much suffering, but it could be else. And at any moment, I know that there were other points in my life where right when I thought I had it figured out is when it all falls apart. And so maybe I’m wondering, do I have it too good? And then I, I’m wondering, like, am I just thinking— I’m thinking myself into my own suffering, but I’m not suffering that much. Like, I’m, I’m way overblowing it. Maybe I want to— Suffering is subjective. We should honor our suffering, even if we say, well, other people have it a lot worse than me. And, and I’m saying this because I’m guilty of it all time. I always tell myself, well, my suffering is nothing compared to the suffering in Syria, to the suffering in Bangladesh, to the suffering in Africa. But in that sense, I don’t do justice to myself because, you know, for good or bad reason, I do suffer. So yeah, I wouldn’t go there. But look, the most insidious form of taking yourself too seriously is when you tell yourself, shit, I take myself too seriously, and I I shouldn’t. That’s the worst instance of taking yourself too seriously. Because if you don’t take yourself too seriously, you are kind towards yourself. It is taking yourself too seriously to say I’m taking myself too seriously? Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, please explain. Because you told me that, so now if I was to listen to it, are you telling myself I would fall prey? If you think it’s so important that you shouldn’t take yourself so Seriously? Then you are taking yourself too seriously. Otherwise you would say, yeah, okay, I’m taking myself too seriously. It’s what is. Right. I take myself too seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Man, you have such a deep journal mindset. But if you go like, oh shit, I’m taking myself too seriously and I shouldn’t, I have to do something about it. What do you think that is? It’s you taking yourself extra seriously. Okay. So not taking yourself too seriously Seriously, entails— it doesn’t imply, it entails being kind to yourself, giving yourself a pass, forgiving. Yeah, you’re much more, much more wise than I, and I know you gotta go, and I’m sorry I keep you. I want to tell you an analogy, and I want to give you a piece of imagery. I was watching The Da Vinci Code, and the first one, there’s this guy, he looked like Neil Patrick Harris. He had— he’s like pale skin, Anyway, okay, and he was praying. Yeah, okay, he’s praying, he’s praying, and he’s taking a whip and chastising himself, like self-mortification. And then he’s portrayed as the crazy one because of that. And I remember watching that movie and thinking, no, we’re the crazy ones because we’re not taking life seriously. This guy is atoning for each sin painfully and specifically. And I, and I’m like, that’s like, I wish I was as courageous as that. Now, you’re probably hearing that and thinking, I’m, I’m worshiping the wrong god, in a sense. I think there is a crucial distinction between taking yourself too seriously and taking life seriously. I wouldn’t do the former, but I absolutely recommend the latter. Taking yourself too seriously is not helpful, neither to nature nor to what you think you are. Taking life seriously is a whole other It’s not a game. It’s very important. In some sense, you can only take life seriously if you don’t take yourself too seriously. Because if yourself consumes life, then you’re not taking life seriously. Life is something that happens through you. If you make it all about you, you’re not making it about life. Do you see what I mean? Okay. See, Tony Robbins has this phrase, life is not happening to you, it’s happening for you, but then you’ve just put a twist on that, or an ancient twist, but you’re saying it’s not happening to you, nor is it happening for you, it’s happening through you. Yeah, Tony Robbins and a lot of the self-help literature and a lot of the New Age and spiritual literature, it’s all about consolation by creating the illusion that your ego is in control of the world and that the universe is some kind of menu and you can just place your order, and if you place your order in just the right way by thinking the right thoughts and applying the right techniques, then you get everything your ego wants. I personally think that’s bullshit. Utter, complete, and unhelpful, demeaning bullshit. I don’t think that’s the way to go. It’s destructive too, not just unhelpful. Destructive, yeah. It elevates the ego to the position of king of an illusory reality. And it will hurt you ultimately, although it may give you a sense of comfort in the beginning. At least in the short term, right? And it will wreck the planet if everybody tries to do that. So look, when I told you, don’t take yourself too seriously, I didn’t mean not to take life seriously. On the contrary, I think life is to be taken very seriously. And the way to go about it is to let it flow through you and not try to wrestle control of it and make it about you. Yourself. There are just a few questions from the audience, and I want to ask you them. You could just answer them shortly. I know you got it. We’ve gone so far, so— okay, yeah, might as well. Just a few more minutes, right? Khalil and Danny PhD Islamic Studies, that’s his username, says, Dr. Kastrup, if mind at large is active, evolving, and excited as reflected in natural processes, doesn’t your model still need to account for a higher level explanation or cause for this activity? Can you repeat the question? Yeah, I’m not sure I understood it, so I copy and pasted it and thought maybe when I read it out loud it would make sense. Dr. Castro, if life is evolving, if it’s active, it’s excited as reflected in natural processes, doesn’t your model still need to account for a higher— Yeah, I don’t think so. I think life is doing what it’s doing, or the universe is doing what it’s doing because it is what it is. It’s an implication from identity. What the universe is determines how it will behave. So it’s doing what it’s doing because it is what it is. And we can model that behavior and predict it through mathematical equations and science and all that. But these are models. They are not the reason or the explanation or the impetus behind the behavior. I think the impetus of the behavior is what mind is. And if I— I don’t really think we need more than that. In a sense, it’s trying to push reduction beyond where it needs to go. Once you get to what the universe is, what else do we need to make sense of its behavior? It’s behaving the way it does because it is what it is. And we can model that behavior and predict. That’s all fine. Now, if the intuition behind the question is that there has to be some grander, higher-level plan, some carefully thought-out fine-tuning or carefully thought-out action. I don’t think that needs to be the case. I think the unfolding or the evolution can be purely instinctive, driven by archetypes, and archetypes are just reflections of what the universe is. The only point that shuns me a little bit is the fine-tuning of the universal constants, which suggests a ridiculously fine level of planning. If interpreted at face value, why are the universal constants so exquisitely fine-tuned to the rise of complexity and life? I don’t have an answer to that, but the most promising avenue to make sense Examples of that, that I have learned of recently, is the work of a physicist called Markus Müller from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. We covered his work a lot on the Essentia Foundation website recently. And basically what he’s saying is that he’s a quantum physicist, and his, his take on quantum physics is that the physical world is actually created from a first-person perspective, that we sort of inferentially build it. And then he has a mathematical argument that if that’s what’s going on, then we would automatically tend to infer physical worlds that are consistent with each other’s. In other words, you would construct a personal physical world of your own. I would construct one for myself through infer— through inference, and they would necessarily be consistent with one another. Your world would be more or less the same as mine because of the dynamics of the inferential processes going on. So basically what he’s saying is that the fine-tuning of the universal constants— that’s my interpretation of what he’s saying. I asked him the question directly, and he said he hadn’t thought about it yet. So I don’t want to put these words in his mouth. My interpretation of what he’s doing is that if physics arises from a first-person perspective, in other words, if the physical world is emergent and not absolute, which is what quantum physics is suggesting, more than suggesting right now, um, then the fact that the universal constants are fine-tuned are, are simply a consequence of the fact that we are inferring the physical world. So you would necessarily infer a physical world that accounts for our existence, because we are the ones inferring it. And therefore, the universal constants would necessarily be fine-tuned, because without it, we couldn’t account for our existence. So we wouldn’t infer that— sounds like the Anthropic Principle. It’s, uh, it’s, um, it’s not quite the Anthropic Principle, but I understand that, uh, at first sight, it’s almost like we’re giving birth to a specific world rather than there are a variety of worlds and we’re the only one that we could Right. Okay. Yes. So he’s not saying he’s not adhering to solipsism. He admits that you have a consciousness in your life. I do. And everybody else does. He’s not a solipsist. All he’s saying is that the physical world, not all possible worlds, but the physical world arises through an inferential process. We infer what the physical world is in order to account for our own existence. And if that happens, then mathematically you can prove that we would all end up inferring the same physical world, more or less. Absolutely interesting. So I’ll look into that. Marcus Miller. Yeah. Great. Okay. Plastic Pears says, hell yeah, right up my alley. Thanks for getting Bernardo on the show. If consciousness is beyond localization, does that imply that the brain is like a radio tuner? Look, I think the radio metaphor is useful if you’re coming from a dualist background or a pure materialist background, it helps you think about the issues we are talking about. I don’t think it is ultimately true though, because it’s a dualist metaphor. There is the signal and there is the tuner, and they are separate things. Like, if the brain is a filter, then the brain itself cannot be made of consciousness. Otherwise, you know, can you talk about a coffee filter made of coffee? You can’t. It would filter nothing. A coffee filter made of coffee, it wouldn’t work. So if I say that everything is consciousness, then even the brain is merely the image of certain conscious processes. It’s the image of the thing. And as such, it cannot filter consciousness because it is itself consciousness. Now, I think what’s happening is that the brain is the image of a dissociative process in consciousness. And dissociation happens in a way that can— things happen because of dissociation association, as if the brain were a filter, if you see what I mean. Because the brain is the image of a dissociative process, things happen as if it were a filter, because dissociation is exclusive. It excludes certain things. It creates a boundary, and it differentiates what’s in from what’s out. And that’s like a kind of filtering in which you let certain things in and you keep other things out. Out. So things work as if the brain were a filter, and that’s the sense in which I think metaphor is useful. But the brain is not literally a filter because you cannot have a coffee filter made of coffee. And for the same reason, you cannot have a filter of consciousness be made of consciousness. I think it’s just an image of a dissociative process that works as if it were a filter. And when you say it’s an image of a dissociative process as seen from the second person on a first person— like, the first— there’s a first person perspective associated with it. One of the— what tripped me up initially, and maybe this will help some other people, is that when we think of mind, we tend to think of our example of mind within our mind, within our head. I know that’s— you don’t like the within our head aspect, but the way that thoughts relate to other thoughts, it’s volutinous and indistinct and equivocal. So how could something as precise and serene as paper and the natural laws of physics come from mind? Well, I guess I’m posing that as a question, but that’s my way of saying it out loud to clarify for some of the audience members who are wondering, how could this all be in mind, given that our own example of mind is nowhere near as precise as the external world seems to be? Our individual minds has arisen from evolutionary processes through cooperation and competition and competition competition in an ecosystem. And because of that, our mind is largely reactive. It works in an impulsive, reactive, unstable way because it has helped us survive. If a tiger would be stalking you, it would help you survive to react very quickly to any sign that the tiger might be stalking you. You’d have to react to things to survive. Some forms of impulsive behavior are also conducive to survival. They allow for quicker reaction time, reproduction. You know, it’s nice to be hopelessly in love with someone that will guarantee reproduction. So you cannot compare the dispositions of our human mind, which have been shaped by competitive and collaborative pressures through evolution. You cannot, you cannot compare the more or less voluble and, and reactive character of our own mentation to the mentation of a mind that has never undergone these competitive pressures. That other mind does not need to does not need to react to threats, does not need to fall in love, because it’s what there is. There is nothing outside it. It’s what there was, there is, and there always will be. So that mind has no reason to become reactive and trigger-happy like our minds are, or voluble like our minds are. Because it didn’t have to survive an ecosystem and compete and react to external influences. So how would it be instead? It would be exactly what it seems to be, quite stable, unfolding very predictably according to its own mental archetypes. And we know it’s stable because we can model the behavior of nature. It doesn’t change its laws from one day to the other. It seems to behave quite stably. And what is a stable mind? It’s an instinctive mind. I’ll offer you an example. Even lower animals, not too low, even crocodiles have very instinctive minds that are to some extent reactive. They will react fast to threats, but that fast reaction is predictable. Crocodiles are incredibly predictable. You can measure what distance between them and you they have to be at in order to try to lunge at you. If the distance is higher than that, they will not even they won’t even try. If it’s shorter than that, they are guaranteed to try to lunge at you and eat you. So instinctive minds are very predictable minds. In the case of the universe, I think it’s instinctive. But in addition to that, it’s not reactive either, because it’s all there is. It doesn’t have anything to have to react to. And that seems to be exactly how it behaves. Mm-hmm. What occurs to me right now with this instinctual metaphor is that it seems like it— there’s a bit of assuming what you’re trying to prove there. So for example, let’s take a fly, and then you shine some photons on the right side, and then its wings on the left move. Okay, the way we explain that is mechanistically and without mind, traditionally. So then this would be an example of either demonstrating that the universe is mechanistic at its core, or that you’re saying, well, Well, mind is what is mechanistic, but I’m asking you about the mechanistic aspect of mind. Yeah, I know exactly where you’re coming from. You’re saying, aren’t you just projecting onto reality what you expect to see in reality? And no, it’s making a theory unfalsifiable when you manage to construe every piece of evidence in the light of your theory, then you turn it into something unfalsifiable. Some people, I mean, I am a believer in evolution by natural selection. I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s random, but I think evolution by natural selection happens. And some people who are in favor of evolution by natural selection make it unfalsifiable because, you see, if the bird-of-paradise has these super colorful feathers that make it obvious in an environment, it’s because it attracts mates that way. By making itself very conspicuous, it will attract mates. Mates will see him and he will be more attractive. That’s why it has colorful feathers. But if it’s a black bird that you can hardly see, it’s boring to death, then no, it survives because it’s camouflaged. Predators can see. So you can make the theory unfalsifiable if you go down this path. Luckily, that’s not what we are doing today to defend the theory of evolution. There are genetic studies, there are experimental studies. So it runs a little deeper than that. But I am sensitive to this idea of turning a theory into something unfalsifiable by interpreting everything favorably. I don’t think that is what I’m doing. And I’ll tell you why. If I start from the premises of the theory, everything is mental and we are part of mind, but nature at large is also mental in nature. What would you expect to be the case based on what we know about life, the universe, and everything? I would be surprised if nature were voluble, unpredictable, and reactive under the framework of my theory, because Because it wouldn’t fit with my theory. Because you see, our minds have undergone very different shaping forces and dynamics than a mind that has never needed to undergo evolution. So the theory suggests or implies that these two types of mind, the dissociated one and the natural one, should behave very differently because one has undergone the pressures of natural selection and The other didn’t. So I think what we are observing is a direct— I think that the universe is predictable and behaves itself differently than our own minds is what you would expect if the theory I am proposing is correct. Anything else would sort of contradict it because then you would say, well, how can these minds be the same? One has undergone the pressures of natural selection and the other the other hasn’t. So by what miracle are they the same? It would be dissonant. It, it wouldn’t be nice. So I don’t— yeah, sorry. Have you thought of a prediction that is falsifiable for your framework of the world, your conceptualization of the metaphysics? I know this is tricky. This even plagues string theory. I can mention a few. Uh, they are on the edge of what technology allows us to measure, but I can mention a few. if we were not aware of any experiential state whose richness and intensity is not directly correlated to the degree of brain activity, then I would say, well, it doesn’t immediately falsify my theory, but, you know, under my theory, If our individual minds are dissociative processes, then there should be some mental states that correspond to a reduction of dissociation, therefore less brain activity, but enriched experience because now you have the cognitive inferential links. So the theory would expect that at least some experiential states would break the correlation between richness of experience and the degree of brain activity. Most of them, most of the time they will go together, but there should be some states in which the reduction of brain activity is a reduction of the dissociation itself. I imagine you can say near-death experience is an example of this. No, psychedelics. There are, there are thousands, there are lots of examples. Psychedelics, hyperventilation, the choking game, erotic strangulation, G-force-induced loss of consciousness, trance, trance states, all of these things, brain injury, acquired Savant syndrome, collateral damage from brain surgery. I can, I mean, I’ve done it before. I have listed like 2 dozen papers that show that these are all instances in which you have reduced or impaired brain activity accompanied by enriched experience. While we’re on the subject of erotic asphyxiation, so is there something about sex that is actually oneness? You know, people say that, well, I feel one with my partner. Is that actually occurring? Is it like the ramified branches of the leaves and they’re coming closer? Or is it just a perception of that? Oneness never ceases to occur. It’s always the case. But some activities may bring you closer to the recognition of it. And I have no doubt that sexual ecstasy brings you quite close to the recognition of the oneness. That is the case all the time. It’s there all the time. We just don’t sense it clearly. We don’t pay attention to it. We’re not open to it. And sexual ecstasy sort of brings that recognition to you. Other activities as well. But, you know, it’s not for nothing that in the subcontinent— there we go again— Tantra is a spiritual path based on sexual ecstasy. You know, these guys realized something there. They are on to something. Can you feel this oneness without feeling any euphoria attached? That is the opposite. Can you feel dysphoria? It— I don’t think euphoria is inherent in nature. I think the euphoria we feel when in close proximity to the recognition of oneness has to do with a kind of relief. Because the dissociated state, we are used to it, so we don’t recognize it anymore for how difficult and taxing it is, how much energy it requires to remain dissociated. And when, when we come to the recognition of oneness, it’s like that, that natural process sort of relaxes and allows itself to be what it naturally is without that tension, that energy, that effort required to mode it in that particular form. And we register that because of the contrast as bliss. Because in comparison to the taxing state we, we are in by the mere fact that we are alive, in comparison to that, it is blissful. But I don’t think it’s inherently blissful in the absence of that contrastual reference, if you know what I mean. Okay, everyone, me and Bernardo, we have to go. What time is it there? Bernardo? It’s 10 to 10, and I haven’t had dinner yet. We are talking since 5 o’clock. Yeah, so we’ve been talking for almost 5 hours. Holy moly. Well, this is probably the best podcast I’ve ever had the pleasure of not only taking part in but listening to. So, oh, thank you, sir. It’s an honor then. I’m glad I contributed to this achievement. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. How was it for you? It’s been fun. If it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been talking to you for 5 5 hours. So that’s the proof that I think it has been very constructive, positive, and very enjoyable. We’ll take one question if you can write this quickly. Someone named Cecily said, what’s the relationship between the universal consciousness and the Platonic realm? I think the motivation for Sir Roger’s postulation of the Platonic realm is that there seem to be some built-in dispositions in nature, some built-in patterns of behavior. And then he postulates this Platonic realm to account for those regularities which he cannot see in the mental world alone or in the physical world alone. I don’t see the need to make that distinction. I think the regularities he sees, the Platonic principles, so to say, are merely the archetypes of the natural mind, the inherent dispositions or the natural frequencies of vibration or the inherent harmonics of the natural mind, which are what they are by virtue of mind being what it is. In other words, you don’t need an ontologically distinct realm to account for those regularities. They are accounted for by the fact that mind is what it is. It had to be something, and to be something, it has to have certain properties, and those regularities are those properties. You don’t need something outside mind to account for them. They are what they represent, what mind is. Does science require materialism in any way, or does logic plus information produce the same predictive power? Science has never required materialism. It’s, uh, it’s a method of study based on rational reasoning and most of all empirical experimentation and observation. None of this requires any metaphysical commitment of any sort, because all of this is about how nature behaves and how we can predict nature’s behavior. None of it, uh, implies a commitment to a particular position about what nature is in and of itself. We cannot have access to nature as it is in and of itself, other than the access we have to ourselves as parts of of nature. And on the basis of that access, the only thing we can say is that just like we are mental beings from within, so is the rest of nature. But science is based on an observation of behavior, cataloging and modeling the regularities of nature’s behavior. That does not require materialism or any metaphysical commitment, also not idealism. That can be based on a complete— that can be done on a complete metaphysical vacuum. It’s just that human Humans are not perfect. We always need the metaphysical narrative to inform our actions. So in practice, many scientists work under the assumptions of materialism. But that is not science. That is the prejudices of the people who practice science. But science as an ideal method, as defined and enshrined in our culture as a method, is completely metaphysics agnostic. We don’t need any metaphysics to make science successful. I would argue that it has much more chances to be successful, even more successful than it already is, if we eliminate metaphysics from it. If we keep ourselves really open to every possibility and just look at what science can tell us, which is the behavior of nature, we would explore avenues of research that today we ignore because our hidden metaphysical assumptions tell us that they are impossible and they will produce nothing. Well, how do we know? We think they are impossible because of metaphysical assumptions. Science would be better off without any metaphysics, certainly without materialism. Thank you, Bernard. Get some rest, get something to eat. I’m gonna— I have— I’ve been fasting, so I’m gonna break my fast as well. And thank you, man. It’s been quite an experience. I’m grateful to you. It’s not been a usual interview. I give 3, 2, 3, 4 interviews per week, and usually it’s the same thing, and this has not been that. So I’m grateful to you. Thanks a lot. I’m grateful to you. To you, and hopefully the mind at large can bless me with a hairline like yours because I’m balding. Don’t take yourself too seriously. I am looking for some, so if anyone knows some treatments for that, I’m looking into follicle, something FUE. We’ll see, we’ll see. Okay, where can people find out more about you? And that’s bernardocastrup.com. Have a good one, man. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Take care. Bye-bye. My background’s in math and physics. I, I did my undergrad in that, and then I went into filmmaking. I’m pretty much a filmmaker since. And now I’ve always had something called, you know, the theory of everything in the back of my mind. Like, first of all, I want to get a, an entire view of the landscape of theories of everything and then pull and make a confection of my own theory. Perhaps I won’t, but at least I want to understand all the series and give an overview to the audience as well. And that’s, that’s actually— it’s not simple at all. It’s taking almost all my time. So if I seem like I am tired, it’s because— I don’t know why, but— well, Bernardo, I can tell you about this afterwards. I had not a trip, but something akin to a trip that just— it sent me in this spiral, this loop of, of a panic attack. I’ve never had a panic attack before, and it had to do with me thinking I’m crazy because I heard a voice. I thought I heard a voice, like I was half sleeping, so I thought I heard my wife say okay or yes, and she could have, but I don’t know if she did, and I was half sleeping anyway. And then I thought, am I going crazy? And since then, for— it’s maybe 4 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, I’ve had trouble sleeping because it’s difficult for me to sit with my own thoughts, and I don’t want to take sleeping medication. It’s so addictive. So, so I’ve had trouble and, and I’m intensely studying for you, intensely studying for some other people, and it’s compounding and compounding, and I feel like I’m wearing myself so thin. And luckily after this I can breathe a big sigh of relief because I don’t have to prep. And maybe we can even do a part 2, but just so you know, that’s where I’m coming from in my mindscape. Yeah, look, these big questions are very dangerous questions. This has been known throughout the history of humanity. That this is dangerous, sacred ground to tread on. They can be all-consuming because they have to do with what we really, really are. And there is vertigo involved in even contemplating that space. So it’s not surprising that this has happened to you. It has happened to me, has happened to nearly every worthwhile philosopher for whom philosophy is a way of life, not just a job. So this is known, although it may be unfamiliar to you. You’re not alone in treading this, this minefield. Thank you, thank you. That, that does help. Something that doesn’t help is knowing that people like Cantor drove himself mad by studying infinity, or at least that’s what he said. And, and I’m, I’m wondering how much of this, with me delving into the depths of reality, which is like the depths of myself as well, is going to bring about psychosis, and I don’t want that. And I had an experience once about 1.5 years ago, and what happened was I was typing and then it said, ‘Yes, you’re not the only one. Ha, I’m here,’ like on its own. And I watched, I’m like, ‘Shoot, is there another part of me?’ And then I immediately got up and I felt waves of anxiety, and I had to— then I was like, ‘Shoot, I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want to have this experience through the rest of my life because I have a wife, I love my life, I don’t want to be crazy. And something that you mentioned, which is known in the literature, is that psychosis is not necessarily a mental disorder but an incompatibility between you and the culture. And I can imagine that people who— if I was to go to a psych ward and talk to schizos, that they would say, yes, yes, this is not what it is, this is not— and then people would think they’re crazy. But I would be like, no, no, no, they’re actually on to something. They’re the true enlightened ones. It’s just we who aren’t able to accept it. And I didn’t want to go to a ward. And then I was like, I don’t want another part of my mind to tell me to kill myself or to kill someone. And I’m not suicidal in the least, but coming from a place of a different part of me telling me what to do, I was worried. And then I took some lorazepam to calm me down, and then I, I had to go downstairs to the concierge and say, can you call me an ambulance? I was alone, right? And then, and then they did, and they were like freaked out. And I was talking to people saying, look, I, I know that this sounds crazy, I’m not crazy, but I don’t want to kill myself. And there was a police officer there at one point. I’m like, I just want you to know, I’m not— I don’t want to reach for your gun. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Like, and the police officer was like, all right, that’s, that’s fine, you’re okay, you’re okay. And then as soon as the ambulance came, checked my heart, I felt calm. But since then I’m like, oh man, I don’t want to have— I don’t want to— oh man, Bernardo, man, like, I don’t want to question reality, but at the same time my job is it. Like, doing this is it. Once you open that Pandora’s box, uh, you cannot put the back. The way to go about it is to learn how to deal with the demons in a functional way that doesn’t take you out of life in society. But our normal state of consciousness is adaptive. It’s not made to give you access to truth. It’s made to adapt you to the circumstances of our living. Even our cultural consciousness is adaptive as well. It allows you to get a job, to be a reliable reliable coworker, to be a reliable partner and father. So I don’t poo-poo psychotic states of consciousness as obviously untrue, not any more than this state of consciousness right now is also untrue, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t go as far as to romanticize psychosis as to think that people undergoing psychosis are enlightened. I think mind has this proclivity to deceive itself in many different ways, and that’s another way of deception as well. Could they have access to information that is real and to which we do not ordinarily have access? Very well, that’s possible. Yes, very all possible. But the important thing is what people make of it, and that’s where people go wrong. It’s trying to interpret that information and weaving a story, uh, about that. That story can be highly dysfunctional and deceptive. It can be literally untrue. So we have to make this distinction between accessing untreaded ground in the river of mind, which is just outside the boundaries of what is functional and adaptive, and interpreting what you access in those altered states of consciousness. And I think people tend tend to go faulty in the interpretation. It’s what people call psychedelic gnosis, that if they have a hallucination about talking to aliens in the Pleiades, they come back and say, well, there are aliens in the Pleiades very interested in our elections and the results of our political system. Well, I wouldn’t go that far because mind has this inherent— seems to have this inherent drive to deceive itself because that’s how it creates Reality.