Ep. 98 - "A Consciousness-Only Ontology" | Dr. Bernardo Kastrup 

It's wonderful seeing brillhant people like you two thinking outside the box. Finally it seems we have a chance of not spending eternity searching in vain for this thing called matter outside consciousness

0:00 Introduction: Can everything be Mental, no Physical world at all? 1:10 Grateful for a Great Conversation with Idealist *Bernardo Kastrup* 3:00 He Lives In A WormHole! *Bernardo Kastrup* 3:44 Congratulations on your second PH.D. 4:44 History with ideas 6:40 Quantities (In The World) and _Qualities_ (In Your Mind) of Experience 8:27 Monism, One Singleness, Not Dualism 9:08 Started as a Default Physicalist, Mother is Catholic Father is Scientific, Logical, Reasoning *Getting Into Objective Idealism* 11:08 All that we are gifted with is Experience, _A World Of Qualities_ 11:27 We Infer A Physical World to make sense of it all 12:08 *_Problem_* The Hard Problem of Consciousness 12:46 Replace "The Physical World" With The World of *_Objective Idealism_* 14:10 First-Person Perspective 16:11 Interaction of Objects. 17:23 The Universe Is The Body of Universal Consciousness 19:34 You can't measure Brain Experience by measuring Physical Body Measures 20:23 The Rubix Cube is an Inanimate Object, It Doesn't Experience 22:00 Neurons make up The Brain, There is nothing it is like to be a cell, there is something to being Bernardo *Universal Law* 26:13, 27:05 It's A Gigantic Neural Network, or at least appears that way 27:42 Dissociative Altars? 29:46 Laws Of Nature: Abstract, Absolute, _Unconscious_ 32:30 That's How It Is 33:43 "Your own human volition is Metacognitive" *Self-Reflection, Thinking About Yourself, What You Desire* 36:30 Steve = Substance Pluralist 44:00 Regular Experience = Mental Glue 45:20 "Being entails properties. Modes of Being. Otherwise it would be Total Chaos" 46:05 46:05 Reductive Physicalism This is one of the top discussions of this Podcast so Far. 9/10, 4.5 Stars out of 5 Stars 51:00 Modern Quantam Physics. 51:45 Fields obey Laws of Physics 53:05 We have to grant Metaphysical Properties to The Mind (I plan to finish this) 54:03 Observable Regularities 55:07 There is a Limit in a Mind’s ability to know itself 55:59 They’re speaking in different forms 56:45 We are meaning seeking animals, agnosticism is respectable, but we don’t want to stop there *_Parsimony_* Superiority/Inferiority (58:58 ) Why do we do this classification? 1:02:00 Experiences and The Physical World 1:03:12 Atoms ⚛️ 1:05:04 A Matter of Scale 1:05:53 A Dynamic, Fluctuating, Busy, Vibrant, Animated Universe 1:07:18 Evolution and Survival *_Universal Consciousness is All There Is_* 1:09:35 Solipsism is the Ultimate Doubter - Presents Consciousness 1:11:50 Conundrums 1:13:28 Evading Parsimony ? 1:15:00 Matter = The Outer Appearance of Inner Experience 1:16:25 Metalogical Parsimony. Multiple Worlds = Multiverse, Infinite Timeline ♾ 1:19:23 *Something Exists* _Let’s stick to what is Given_ 1:20:10 How Many Categories Are There? • Sight • Taste • Sound • Touch •Smell All Consciously experience 1:23:30 An Axe is Meant To Be An Axe To Be is To Be Like What You Are 1:24:45 Nature comes in many categories 1:26:18 Unification, Function, Mental Experience Output 1:27:17 *_At The End of The Day, All you Have is Experience, and everything else is theoretical inference_* 1:31:01 Core Subjectivity, Ipseity(?) 1:31:53 “We are like branches of a tree, but we share the root” that’s poetic 1:34:15 We are the carriers of Reality 1:35:30 We Are Everything, We Are Nothing

My favorite dude in the world of intellectual monism. Bernardo!

I'm compelled to commend you, Steve, for having the patience to speak at such length with someone who's ontology contrasts with yours to the extent I imagine Kastrup's does. It's a patience I feel inspired to strive for. Despite my nearly entire disagreement with him starting from the point of initial premises, your willingness to give him a voice here and press him a bit on a few points along the way makes it easier for those like myself to get a bit of a better idea of where he and those who follow him are coming from. Thank you!

What a great conversation. You two should talk once every two months.

Great job excellent guest hes one of the future leaders in thinking as related to our deepest questions in life Great job keeping the conversation flowing nicely

Thank you for all of your work! Your videos are very interesting! Please keep making more! All the best to you.

Bless you Steve! On the cusp of a unitary experience. We are all appearing to exist in Mind.

You really want to check out Steiner's philosophy of freedom - he demonstrates that neither concepts nor pure experience are ontologically complete without the other.

It was a real treat for my exploration of truth about myself.Thanks.

Kudos, Steve and Bernardo. This is the most important discussion on earth at this chaotic time in history.

Have you read any Steiner on the difference between percepts and concepts? His book "intuitive thinking as a spiritual path" would be the go for it. Even though he is a bit of an outcast for philosophy - but you like outcasts I think

Thank you, great interview. Yes, we can only experience experience. And obviously only now, here.

Very interesting. Excellent discussion. At 44:00 you talk about patterns. Can we also see it as habits? Like our human behaviour that always strives towards habitual behaviour?

Great guys! Very knowledge. They just step short in investigation the primary experience/asumption, the one of the I, the separate self. A little Ramana maharshi would maybe not resolve but reder most of their open questions as erroneous because they are based on an erroneous assumption and would therefore not arise if that asumption itself would be investigated. 😘

Great dialogue. I am curious as to why Bernardo feels so confident in subtracting intentionality, relflection, deliberation etc. from universal consciousness when these are some of the most striking features of first-person, human consciousness. If first-person, human consciousness is ground zero for interpreting the world, all we experience, what exactly could be meant by a non-intentional, non-reflective, non-deliberative consciousness? If universal consciousness is so fundamentally at odds with human consciousness, and first-person consciousness is our surest guide to consciousness as such, how can we (why should we) even call this universal consciousness, consciousness?

This was fantastic.

The closing comments he made are something that needs to be explained to everyone.

Is the unknown part of mind the space that generates experience that we interact with that psychologists would term the subconscious?

I never heard Bernardo mentioning the work of Tom Campbell for his scientific work in idealism. I wonder if Bernardo finds his work and ideas valid. He does seem to support the work of Don Hoffman.

Have you got a video explaining your view of conciousness arising due to laws?

Fantastic thanks

Just read his book "Why Materialism Is Baloney" really need this podcast to grasp my head around this concept of everything being mental. I just can't conceptualise it however hard I try. And I've read the whole book.

If the rubiks cube doesn't have something like an experience, then how can it exists within the idealistic universe? It looks like a contradiction or at least an exception to the whole theory...

Wow🌅you get a sunshine💚

all we have is immediate sensory experience and stories about my ISE and stories about my stories, etc. that’s it “concepts” are stories in language

He asserted that the mind be an object by claiming "in- and outside it"

Would "consciousness only epistemology" not be a more appropriate definition ?

Philosophy is quite monetarily attractive in the West. It's not true in the rest of the world. Idealism is wrong, but it is also irrefutable. Folks in CERN knows that. The are living in an alternate world captivated by idealism. Their world escapes the categories of classical and modern logic. As a computer scientist, Kastrup has a unique engagement with reality and his philosophy is a philosophy of his science.

Anything that has permanence in state space relies on harmonic regularity.

I am not sure how to articulate this intuition but let me just say this: it seems to me at least questionable that cosmic consciousness- of which we are only a dissociated alter- understands 'itself' _less_ than we do. Somehow we can understand ourselves and the cosmic mind in a sense better than "God" himself/herself/itself. My consciousness, which is only split-off from the cosmic mind, is somehow more intelligent than the cosmic mind. Perhaps Kastrup is right but it does seem strange that I should have greater insight than the cosmic mind itself. Moreover, it is unaware of us but we are aware on it.

Perception divides the holomovement.

If it's all mental where did mental come from?

The idea that the whole/God/the universe would not be aware of one insignificant person's thought, as it would be like an event within a single cell in my body... This would seem to be a projection of human cognitive and perceptual limitations? Christian tradition, if I understand correctly, has it that God is not only aware of but loves every sparrow...

So pluralists exist...

Hegel and the gnostics already claimed all this in case no one noticed that BK is just rebranding them….

Simple answer to your 18:50 question: If you were in a dream, and you saw a Rubik’s cube, you’d be looking at something that looks physical, but is purely mental. The Rubik’s cube would have experienced or even be an experience per se - but it would be inherently mental

I liked the conversation and i find Kastrup's model to have some beauty. Nevertheless it didn't convince me. 1)There is no clear-cut correspondence between alters and 2nd person-point views. Are alters bacteria? If yes, is my hand which is made of cells part of my alter ,is it fragmented into many cell-alters, or part of the universe's total mentality? Also i don't believe that all body parts are the appearance of my consciousness. You can draw blood from an artery of my brain and yet, to an extend that a brain part is not affected, my consciousness will not be affected. 2)The 1st person point of view has less information than the 2nd person point of view, suggesting that we don't have a simple 1-1 correspondence. The 1st person experience is a subset of the brain, that is, lots of this activity is unconscious. First, this suggests that not even the whole brain at any given time corresponds to experience. Looking at the brain, there is "more information' about you, with only a subset of it becoming experience for you. Similarly, If the universe has similarly conscious experience which is a subset of its' unconscious mentality, then the 2nd person point of view of the universe-which is uncounscious is "richer' and "overflows" the consciousness of the universe. That is, the 2nd person point of view, is "richer" than the 1st person experience of the universe, suggesting that there is more to first person experience for the universe. The "Structure" of the 2nd person point of view seems to be richer and has more information than the 1st person point of view. 3)Moving around the universe's object would change the universe's mentality. This just seems to re-brand 'physical" as mental, since the causal aspect does job through physical means. Ofcouse, Kastrup could say that instead of spatial relations, there are mental relations that allow for this causality, but it seems word-playing at this point, baptizing the physical stuff as mental. This is the reason that this model can be interpreted as a neutral monist model in a better way ,than "idealist". Both "inside"/1st person and "outside'/2nd person aspects are real and possibly complimentary, but not identical. Despite that, it is not neccesary to pose 2 different substances, but could be viewed as two different aspects or properties (for a stronger view) of one thing.

i find radical agnosticism to be the EASIEST position to live in day-to-day you just have to accept that... “i don’t know for sure” i have my theories and they work pretty well most of the time but i certainly don’t need to believe that they are THE TRUTH... THE WAY IT REALLY IS they’re just the best stories i’ve come up with... so far

I like Kastrup a lot and I think his analytic idealism or "cosmic idealism" (the name Chalmers has given it) is a vast improvement on the fundamentally mindless universe that metaphysical materialism posits. And indeed, it has the excellent merit of not running into the so-called "hard problem", which, as Kastrup has pointed out, is merely an artifact of circular thinking. However, the idea that ultimate reality, or universal consciousness, is, to quote Kastrup, "low level instinctual experiential activity" (24:05), à la Schopenhauer's cosmic "Will", means that Kastrup's version of cosmic idealism falls prey to the very same objection faced by naturalism (the idea that nature is causally closed), which is roughly: Why should nature, or the universe, exist in the first place? This is because, on the face of it, the "Will", or universal consciousness, of Kastrup's idealism is no less contingent than anything else. But that reality should consist of nothing but contingent being/s is a metaphysical absurdity; it raises the question "why?", and only offers the the non-answer, "just is", or "brute fact". The solution to this for philosophers like Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas was to say (and offer an argument to the effect) that contingent being (nature) is an expression of, and so dependant on, ontologically transcendent necessary being (wajid al-wujud bi-dhatihi or, roughly equivalently, actus essendi subsistens). The trouble with Kastrup's idealism, on the other hand, is that it does not identify universal consciousness with necessary being (or, if you like, Atman with Brahman), but only with nature (that is, the totality of contingent beings); Kastrup's universal consciousness then, being contingent, is still on the same ontological level as nature (even if, at the same time, it completely embraces and subsumes nature as nothing other than its extrinsic appearance to dissociated alters of itself). This is actually very different to the classical forms of "cosmic idealism" such as Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism - or, for that matter, Neoplatonism - in which ultimate reality, or universal consciousness, is genuinely transcendent. Incidentally, this is also why Schopenhauer's metaphysics is not nearly as close to Vedanta as he apparently thought or suggested. I understand now why Kastrup describes himself as a naturalist; analytic idealism may indeed be described as a "naturalistic idealism". Although this certainly makes him relatively more "respectable" or "orthodox" (right-thinking and mainstream), it does not make his analytic idealism a better thesis.

Right, "Consciousness Only exists", but be careful in using the word "mental"! Pure Consciousness "In-Itself", is the Essence of Bernardo's Idealism but it's not new. The most eloquent proponent of the Consciousness only philosophy was Shankara (788-820). His Advaita Vedanta states that the entire universe IS Pure Consnciousness. However, to directly experience that, one must use certain methods developed by the ancient Buddhists and Hindus designed to enable one to enter in a non-dual state that transcends the mind. Logic and mathematics won't get you there.

Instead of natural laws use the concept of habits... universe is volitional AND habitual.

Does this mean universal consciousness is evolving?

The hierarchy of awareness is a fractal scaling of event horizons.

Absolutely adore Bernardo, but does he, like many of us, want his cake and eat it too?

i love Bernardo but WAIT! how can the Universe have a simple mentality and have put together all the cosmological constants? these guys have it in reverse. the universe is all knowledge. WE ARE THE DEVOLVED little pieces that are primitive. Bernardo, why can't we be disassociated and still connected? We are never disassociated.

Pair up and write a book...you’re still infinitely far away from actual truth and real , fundamental explanation as apposed to derivative models and human, developed, conceptual reflection...imagination always infers, this is a supreme paradox...start with language, because that is all that is happening here...go backwards, and consider human development from conception, consider the level of nervous system development at birth, consider how human development unfolds, consider that perception and language is mostly hardened at each level of development, and that the hard physical and metaphor are the imperative anchor...this is only the beginning

Hi Steve, your questions are too, too long. Put all the knowledge, you are always trying to show, into your questions, into the first part of the question. 70 % of your questions are unnecessary shows.

If it's evolving then it must have had a beginning.

If consciousness is all there is, and humans are in that universal matrix of consciousness, then calling human beings 'alters', doesn't explain the phenomenon responsible for that dissociation. Because, unless some other ontological category existed, the 'alter' theory, doesn't explain the idea of a boundary in any meaningful way. If there is a boundary, in what does that boundary consist. If there is only mind, then a boundary between what and what. If we posit only a single substance, mind, then how could there be a boundary, between an 'alter', which is mind, and universal consciousness, which is also mind. The 'alter' theory does not offer a plausible explanation for the cause of dissociation of the alter. At least if we posited the existence of another ontological category, such as matter, it would readily provide that boundary and at the same time provide an explanation of that boundary. Matter at least would provide an explanation for the boundary and separation of one person from another, by means of a physical body, which also conforms to our experience.

Is Bernardo a theist?

I love theories like this. We don't understand consciousness, so obviously it must be MAGIC! There is no hard problem of consciousness. Nearly every day the pile of evidence gets higher pointing to consciousness being nothing more than an emergent process of a sufficiently complex system. But, by all means, keep grasping at your magic of the gaps nonsense.

Why pseudo philosophy is so appealing to people? Maybe because it pretends to have comforting "answers" for our existential and epistemic anxieties.

I would call him a spiritual materialist. Essentially what happens when you spiritualize materialism. Still no meaning to the universe, just a dumb flux of stuff.

Idealism is easily refuted.

Even kastrup cant create a thought. So our logic, rational 'reasoning' flies out of window. We cant reason.