Consciousness All the Way Down? | Robert Wright & Bernardo Kastrup | The Wright Show

[Music] hi bernardo hi there how are you doing hi robert great yourself i can't complain let me introduce this i'm robert wright this is the right show available on both streaming video and via audio podcast uh you're bernardo castro uh a dutch well computer scientist by training but in addition to having a phd in computer science you have a phd in philosophy you also have a cat it looks like is that a cat i see yeah yeah that's uh that's uh flocky yeah nice and i'm sure you can hear from the other side usually he's here well he should feel free to roam uh you you think your cat has consciousness this is what we'll be talking about absolutely yes private conscious in their life yeah and by that we mean it is like something to be your cat to use the formulation of thomas nagel right we can agree that that's what we mean when we say something is conscious yes phenomenal consciousness there is something it is like to be my cat so my cat is phenomenally conscious or just conscious okay um so uh let me continue a little bit so uh as i said you have a phd in philosophy and that that has uh come to characterize your public identity more than the computer science uh you've uh become pretty well known for talking about a particular view on the consciousness question known as idealism uh and a particular variant of that i guess uh that has a long tradition in both western and eastern philosophy um so barkley was an idealist i think you claim schopenhauer as being very much in your lineage in fact you wrote a book about schopenhauer uh recently called decoding schopenhauer's metaphysics um a couple of your other books are the idea of the world and earlier why materialism is baloney and maybe that gives us some hint of what idealism means but we'll we'll we'll get to that um the um anyway in addition to having a traditional western philosophy idealism is very much associated with uh ancient indian philosophy uh the vedantic uh stuff and schopenhauer himself i think uh felt an uh a kinship with vedantic philosophy the the um so what i want to first of all before we try to as i as i said i think you know people may have trouble wrapping their mind around your view and i want to work hard to help us all do that um but i i want to first say that it's in the nature of the problem of consciousness it seems to me that people who are arguing about it often have trouble understanding what the other person is either saying you know what i mean i mean there are a lot of issues where you know you disagree with a person but you understand exactly what their position is with consciousness it seems to me not infrequently you're either saying i don't even understand what how you're conceiving of this thing or you're saying you do not understand what my position even is i would think that you face that problem even more than most it must be pretty common for people to say what the hell are you talking about right that's right that's the main issue is what the hell bernardo is talking about yeah when i say that idealism means that reality is only mind people think that reality is impersonal individual minds because they cannot conceive of mind as a type of existence of existence they can only conceive of mind as an individual mind cooped up in a head and and so it they misunderstand idealism as a form of solipsism as a statement that all reality is in your mind right that's not what idealism is saying idealism is saying there is a reality out there beyond our personal minds but that reality too is mental in essence so you're not saying that i am a mere illusion that you're having and that i don't actually exist which i'm i'm right i'm gratified to hear i haven't ruled out the possibility that it's the other way around that you are the illusion but i'm glad i'm certainly glad you don't think i'm an illusion so let me let me try to uh give you my understanding of what you're saying or at least to get as far along as i can in in that monologue before you interrupt me and tell me i've got something wrong okay so i i i think most people think of the physical world as being the fundamental thing and consciousness subjective experience or as you say mind and i think you're you're using mind as roughly synonymous with consciousness correct okay they they see that as something that's associated with part of the material world okay but i think most people if they pause to think about it they think there was a time when there was no consciousness the universe gets created it's this physical thing it exists there is the material world but uh it i think most people would say that it's with uh the advent of life living systems that you might start getting subjective experience but the material world is what's fundamental first of all temporally it existed before consciousness the average kind of you know person would say there there are these pan psychists who think that all material has some consciousness associated with it but let's leave them aside i think the average uh intuition is that uh the material world existed before consciousness existed uh that even now consciousness is only associated with a subset of the material world and and in that sense it's kind of an add-on it's something that parts of the material world have i have consciousness um and you take issue with that you're saying that no it's consciousness that's fundamental uh in fact it's so fundamental that i don't think you'd even say the material world as we normally conceive it is the add-on you're not just asking us to reverse the relationship i think and think of consciousness as fundamental and then there's also this material world you're saying the material world as we conceive it is really just not at all the material world as we conceive it it is only a manifestation of consciousness that is correct yet there is a lot in the intuition that you were describing individual consciousness individuated consciousness separate consciousness did arise at some point in the history of the cosmos it wasn't there from the beginning and it did arise when life arose so life is what individuated consciousness looks like or to speak a more technical term life is what dissociated aspects of mind look like when observed from the outside so parts of mind that are kind of severed off like my consciousness is just a a part of the universal consciousness that is kind of it is discrete it is distinct and yet there is some kind of continuity with the universal consciousness that's correct so what you lose is what we might call call um associative inference what you lose is the ability to link your thoughts uh and cognitively associate them with something that's happening beyond you beyond your personal self so you become cognitively isolated now we know this happens in mind we know it happens in human minds humans can become internally dissociated it's called dissociative identity disorder in the psychiatric literature we know that dissociative processes in the brain of a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder look like something identifiable you can diagnose people with identity dissociative identity disorder or did by looking at functional mri or brain scanner images so those dissociative processes look like something so the argument is that in the mind of nature when dissociation happens the resulting dissociative processes look like something and what they look like is what we call biology life metabolism but that doesn't mean that before life arose there was no consciousness there was consciousness consciousness is the only thing that exists but before they are the the rise of life there was no dissociated aspect of consciousness so was it like something to be the universe before life existed i think there has always been something it is like to be the universe even before life existed and and if you could go back in time to a point before life arose and look at the universe you would see a material what we call colloquially a material or physical universe very similar to what we see today just more than four and a half four billion years ago but if nobody no dissociated aspects of consciousness were looking at it then the only thing that would be experienced would be the first person perspective of the universe in other words what it is like to be the universe as opposed to what it is like to observe the universe now is this uh a variant of pan psychism then there's something you have in common with van cyclists but uh are are you a pan psychist or you know again so pansys think that there is some degree of consciousness or sentience or something associated with every physical thing every atom right are they what's the relationship between you and them very little surprisingly little pen psychists acknowledge that physical entities have standalone existence idealists think that physical entities are just appearances they are what mental processes look like when observed from a certain perspective to speak more technically when observed from across a dissociative boundary so physical entities under idealism have no standalone existence they are just forms of manifestation appearances images extrinsic appearances of something that is inherently mental pen psychists acknowledge that physical entities do have standalone existence and they have fundamental properties like mass charge spin oh and in addition they have the property of being conscious fundamentally so all they achieve is to avoid the explanation because you just say well consciousness is fundamental so i don't need to reduce it but there is still a physical world that is conscious while i say that the physical world is in consciousness not that it is conscious and there is a tremendous difference here and i think penn psych is misflawed for a number of reasons not the least of which is that it is physically incoherent it is contradictory with the quantum field theory for instance oh yeah i should write down quantum physics in case we have time to get to it the the um let me this is uh i'm afraid the nature of this conversation is going to be a little tangential just because uh you raise questions in my mind and i think maybe answering them would help shed light i promise to try to get back to all the main branches we're on before we take the tangent so i mean one thing that occurred to me listening to you is like i think one thing that is appealing to materialists about materialism is it seems really super clear cut like with with evolute let's talk about natural selection okay you'd probably agree that when it's described in material terms okay you start at the very beginning for whatever reason you have these self-replicating strands of physical information they're just patterns physical pattern they replicate themselves uh when when errors uh happen in the copying process and you get a pattern that's even better at replicating itself uh that pattern will persist and will out compete patterns that are not so good at that and you can you can follow that uh as different as that may sound that pattern from being a human being you can follow that logic very clearly uh all the way up through the creation of the cell the complex cell multicellular life humans it it all really makes sense everything in my body can be clearly explained by reference to that uh and and moreover it's it's a it's kind of a testable hypothesis there are a lot of things that seem to only make sense in light of the theory of natural selection and i guess people would say wait you're asking me to replace that view which is so appealing with the view that really what's fundamental is this super mushy stuff that i can't think about clearly right you know what i mean yeah yeah but there's so much um wrong in what you said and so much right as well look idealism doesn't replace science idealism is is an ontology not a scientific theory scientific theories predict the behavior to be clear and i know that you're and i understand your view which is that if you back that materialism is not an inherent property of a scientific worldview it's it's something that comes along but what science is is the uh study of regularities and the coming up with laws that help you predict the regularities but you you you can do science without being confident there's a physical world out there i understand that i i i uh so so i'm not saying do you understand what's appealing about a scientific worldview i i'm saying do you understand what's appealing uh about us specifically the materialist kind of incarnation so to speak of a scientific world view just to me i understood your questions um idealism does not replace our understanding of causation neither does it contradict it so all of those patterns you are talking about that have on that underlie the evolution of life on this planet how cells evolve and become multicellular organisms reacting to environmental pressures and the accrual of genetic mutations that leads to to greater fit all of this is still correct there is no reason to throw away any part any reliable part of science because of idealism so because the world that we see around us does exist and it is outside of us as individual minds none of that is denied what is denied is the following physicalists assume or infer that this world of qualities around us this world of colors melodies we mean materialists materialists i will use the word materialist now so materialists assume that the world of qualities we see is actually created by our brains there are no colors out there there are no flavors out there because colors and flavors our qualities and qualities are somehow in a way that nobody could ever explain generated by our brain inside this goal but there is a world up there that is quality less it has no qualities it's pure abstraction so all of those patterns that you were talking about the evolution of life on this planet they actually were patterns of abstraction if we would see those patterns then our brains would somehow engender up some qualities that we would experience within our heads but the world as it is in itself would have none of those qualities it would be pure abstraction idealism grants that there is death world it grants that those patterns did unfold and have led to the evolution of life and ultimately to us but idealism says they are not pure abstraction those patterns are patterns of transpersonal mentation they are something we can have some relationship with that we can say more precisely what it is it is mentation and we are all acquainted with mentation uh you mean mental activity mental processes mental activity of the kind of thoughts so we can conceive of the world as it is in itself as opposed to pure abstraction like materialism we can conceive of it as transpersonal thoughts and now we have to be wary of antropomorphizing those kinds of thoughts they are not thoughts like ours these are instinctive predictable transpersonal thought-like processes but if you were to observe those thought-like processes throughout the course of evolution you would have seen those cells and those patterns of causation the accrual of genetic mutations all of those things the cells the genetic mutations would have been the extrinsic appearances of what is in and of itself transpersonal mental processes that just appear to you in the form of cells and their crew of genetic mutations and so on and so forth so our our understanding of the causal chain that has led to us is left untouched by idealism what idealism solves are other problems like the problem of the heart problem of consciousness how does the brain somehow generate consciousness that problem is eliminated under idealism now that's what you take to be the so-called heart problem of consciousness is like how do you get well i i think uh colin again called it the water into wine problem how how how do you get from the physical stuff what is the process of translation from physical stuff into this subjective stuff that's what you think of as a hard problem that's correct so to to to frame it more strictly the hard problem is the following there is nothing about physical parameters which are purely quantitative in terms of which we could deduce at least in principle the qualities of experience right there is no bridge between the two they are incommensurable domains but that problem only arises if you think that the brain causes individual consciousness but if you think that the brain is what individual consciousness looks like from across a dissociative boundary then you still have the the precise correlations between brain activity and inner experience because the former is what the letter looks like when observed from the outside but you don't you no longer have to explain how purely quantitative parameters such as mass charge momentum spin frequency amplitude magically translates into colors and melodies and flavors because they don't they don't translate they are an appearance not the cause right although i think a lot of people would say well it's good that you've uh laid to rest one challenging problem that we couldn't wrap our minds around it's just that now they're having trouble wrapping their minds around the idea that what they see is the physical world is the manifestation of this mushy stuff right it's extremely intuitive in fact it's just that our culture over the last two centuries or so has manufactured artificial plausibility from materialism which is probably the the worst least sustainable ontological option on the table today but you can get intuition about that in the following way suppose you're sad you're devastatingly sad you feel that sadness it's a concrete present reality for you you are directly acquainted with it so much so that you almost you almost are the sadness um if you look at yourself in the mirror while you're feeling that you will see tears running down your eyes and contorted facial muscles the tears and the contorted facial muscle muscles material physical stuff they are what your sadness looks like when observed from an outside perspective on a mirror as opposed to when experienced directly feeling the sadness so there you have a direct intuition about how the matter of your body is the appearance of what you feel from the inside you're conscious in their life your sadness sadness on the inside when observed from the outside material tears material material contorted facial muscles now you just extrapolate this to all matter including matter that's not part of a biological living organism the matter of the moons and quasars and and and stars and solar systems that those two are the extremes extrinsic appearance of transpersonal mental processes which are not human-like they do probably almost certainly do not have higher level mental functions such as the ability to introspect self-awareness to think deliberate deliberately about things and create plans no they just unfold spontaneously very simple mentation in a certain sense but mentation which also appears as matter when observed from across a dissociative boundary which dissociative boundary our dissociative boundary the boundary that characterizes us as individual living beings as opposed to the universe at large so the the dissociative boundary is what we think of as the bounds of the self of the personal self of the person itself in the east is used in in a transpersonal sense but yes in the west the dissociative boundary is the boundary of your personal self yeah let me ask you something you know i've done uh meditation uh retreats i wrote a book about uh meditation called why buddhism is true and um i've had the experience on retreat uh of being you know like a week into the retreat or something when you're your nature of your consciousness is really starting to change pretty fundamentally and one experience i've had is uh suddenly you know it's like i feel say a tingling in my feet and i hear a bird singing and for a while uh the tingling in my feet seems no more or less a part of me than the birds singing okay the bounds of the self have started to dissolve now in your metaphysics what's going on at that point well i think you're still a dissociated altair alternative what does that mean by the way i've seen a-l-t-e-r is that that's the word uh altered yeah that's the technical word used in psychiatry to identify the dissociated centers of awareness in a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorders it used to be called that's the old name yeah right okay and by the way they have uh different personalities at different times right the idea isn't that they have them at the same time right actually there is that very compelling evidence that they are all active at the same time they are all co-conscious but not all in executive control so only one alter has control of the body if you will assumes control over the executive functions of the body yeah but the authors that are not in executive control they remain co-conscious there's a lot of evidence for that uh now emerging fascinating so wait where were we before i got you to define altar um you're younger than you tell individual self and buddhism in your experience yeah okay so so i was still dissociated you're saying but there's something going on right yeah okay so because you were hearing the bird you're hearing a sound that's a perceptual experience i think perceptual experiences are only possible if there is a dissociative boundary because perception is the mental impingement of a mental process outside the dissociative boundary impinging on the dissociative boundary and we call that perception things that touch your skin photons that hit your retina and so forth so you were still perceiving the bird so you there was still a dissociative boundary otherwise you would be the bird wait i also perceive things from within my body and that's within my dissociative shell right uh do you really call that you could say that there is bodily perception because your nervous system is not your entire body i i think what i was kind of realizing at that moment is that there actually isn't much different i mean there are reports from my foot there are reports from the bird you know but but but but i'm kind of sensing them well i'm sensing the foot thing in my foot kind of i don't know anyway go ahead i'll get there okay i was not through yet yeah um so yes there is bodily perception as well but that's just your nerve terminations the inside your body that perceives certain bodily processes it's still perception your nervous system as a whole is still sort of a dissociated aspect of mentation uh collecting information from the outside through outside impingement on the dissociative boundary now in addition to this very low level you know biological thing perception which reflects the lowest level of dissociation in addition to that what leads us what leads us to identify as separate entities is an inner narrative it's a story we are constantly telling ourselves about what we are and what we are not and i know that so palpably because when i was about nine or ten years old i started for six months i had that tremendously strange thought that realization that i am me i am not the things i see the things i hear around me i must be me not only that i have never been these things outside me that's culture beginning to assert itself on you and and that felt so weird the thoughts that the thought that i was not the world i perceived around me so weird that was the rise of that mental narrative of a personal self and what you can get through and see through in meditation is this narrative and you realize that the bird is just as much a part of the mind that you are as your inner bodily processes and your inner sadness your inner wishes your fears your desires and so on and so forth but because you still have perception there is still that fundamental layer of dissociation otherwise you wouldn't hear the bird you would be the bird you would know what it is like to be the bird you would know what it is like to be the universe right as opposed to perceiving the universe so you were still dissociated but you punched through the layer of narrative-making yeah i mean i would say that i think most people don't have to have an epiphany at age nine to decide that they are just them i think for most people that's the default assumption and that's why i'm a little i'm a little honestly skeptical of the idea that uh until a couple of centuries ago everybody really got the picture and then suddenly we started uh you know thinking of uh our you know ourselves as uh fundamentally you know thinking of the material world as material and so on i i think i personally think materialism is a very natural intuition which isn't to say i think it's true i just i haven't run into many people who you know who who said you know it wasn't until i was 10 i realized uh that i wasn't that i wasn't that wall right i mean okay look what people consider to be the intuitive aspect of materialism is actually contradicted by materialism most people think that materialism means that the world of qualities you see around you really exists outside of you s qualities well materialism denies that materialism says that the world of qualities your experience is generated somehow in some magical way by your brain inside your skull so when you look up to the sky in a clear night and you see a bright star the star you see the qualities you perceive are underneath the surface of your skull and not out there in space because it's your brain generating the qualities that you call the star now there is something outside your real skull but that something is entirely abstract it has no qualities you can't visualize it the best you can do is to say that it's a bunch of mathematical equations floating in a vacuum but even that is too much it's less than that it's pure abstraction so materialism if you really understand what materialism means and what its implications are it is not intuitive at all it's just that people think of materialism as something else they think of materialism as idealism because it's idealism that says the real world of qualities is outside your head it's not generated inside your skull your skull is an appearance of a mental process it's not the generator of that world you see around you um so we we have a perverse game of you know steel or switch in which people materialism is popular because one people don't understand what it means and two it is so incomplete that anything that you see in terms of empirical evidence can in principle be accommodated by materialism because materialism doesn't say at all how the brain generates experience so whatever we see in terms of the correlations between experience and brain activity in principle materialism can accommodate it because it doesn't make a statement um so cruelly what materialism has going for it that's most important is ignorance and incompleteness let me let me uh ask you about a particular case of perception that is i think kind of related to what you're saying so people think of plants as green right but actually green is the one thing plants aren't the reason they see plants is green is because plants reject green light the other the red light other kinds of light they can make use of and convert into energy green light they have no use for so they deflect it and it hits your eye and yet we think of plants as green is that at all related to what you're saying yes but what i'm saying goes even deeper because although materialism rejects that there is green at all out there in the world that green is produced magically by our brain inside our skull materialism does say that the contours the silhouettes the forms angles and geometric relationships we see on the screen of perception corresponds to real geometric relationship relationships in that abstract world of physical entities that has standalone existence so the forms of the world are the same as the forms we perceive um but even that is now i don't want to use the word debunked because i don't like the word but it's contradicted by our understanding of perception it assumes very naively that perception is a kind of transparent window that we have into the world so we can see the forms of the world as they are in themselves but we know now that that cannot possibly be the case there are two at least two completely independent lines of thinking that tell us that that cannot be the case number one is entropy um if we were to mirror the states of the world in our inner perceptual states there would be no upper bound to the diversity of our perceptual states because they mirror what is out there in the world and we do not know whether there is an upper bound in the states of the world that means that we could not control or or cap our inner entropy and we would basically dissolve into hot soup so seeing the world if perception mirrored the states of the world in order to capture the actual forms of the world seeing the world would be deadly it would be like seeing the gorgon except that instead of turning into stone we would turn into hot soup we would die just by seeing because the world is too complicated according to the materialist worldview itself that there's too much data out there too much diversity of data i mean i mean the world is not entirely entropic there is well actually you would say it's not out there but i mean we think of it as having structure and order we don't think of we the the the physical view of the world isn't that it's all soup out there it's that actually no there is structure and order there are the walls yeah the statement is not that the world it has infinite entropy the statement is that a living being which is a tiny subset of the world if that living being were to mirror the variety of states of the world yeah then it could not maintain its structural integrity because a living being is a tiny subset of the world what we would be asked to do is to imagine that a tiny subset of a superset that tiny subset could contain as much information as the superset it is a part of that doesn't work or at least there would be no guarantee that we would survive but i think the standard response from evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology would be well yeah i mean the kinds of organisms that survive in natural selection are the kind that are good at filtering out a whole lot of information so they can focus on the critical information right even then even then we are too tiny okay i'm not making a cut and that's not what the studies show i'm not making a categorical statement that we would necessarily die the point is we would have no control over whether we would die or not by seeing the world now when we say that the world has limited entropy you have to remember that the world we are talking about is already what is perceived so the entropy is already filtered out by hypothesis because you're talking about the world as you perceive what is naive is to say that you perceive the world the forms of the world as as they are in themselves because then there would be no structural upper bound on our internal entropy and then at least statistically speaking some of us would have to die just by looking at the world if you looked wrongly at the world now we know that's not the case so perception is not a transparent wind wind sorry windscreen into the world perception is a dashboard of dials we are pilots of an airplane and we are flying by instrument our sense organs are the sensors of the airplane measuring relevant salient things about the world outside and the results of those measurements are presented on a dashboard of dials that tell us accurate important information about the world and that's what perception is it's the dashboard okay we do not have a transparent windscreen to see the world as it is in itself right all we have is the dials showing what's measured about the world and evolution gave us a good enough dashboard to survive we can fly by instruments you can land safely without seeing what's actually out there and that dashboard limits the entropy because the dials have certain limited scales and they capture what's salient for your survival but they don't give you an unbound entropic view into the world as it is in itself but i think all that a lot of uh evolutionary biologists would agree with or psychologists or something right i mean exactly that doesn't sound radical to me it's not radical at all in fact evolution as uh professor donald hoffman has been saying in recent years evolution doesn't favor perceiving the world as it is evolution favors perceiving the world in what way is whatever way is best to increase your chances of survival this is i have had him on the show and i mean with all due respect that itself is far from an original observation on his part i mean evolutionary psychology has emphasized that in in what he would consider trivial and mundane ways uh that is the case i mean just to give you a simple example um we overestimate the speed of approaching objects presumably because it's better to get out of the way too soon than to get out of the way too late right now that that is not a a metaphysically significant illustration of the fact that uh our brains are not necessarily designed to perceive the world accurately but the principle is long and well established in evolutionary psychology that that uh that uh you know that what what what evolution preserves is kinds of perceptions that are conducive to the rep to the replication of the genes and period and if and and that often corresponds they would say to an accurate view of the world but if it doesn't then accuracy loses out so that's not new now now hoffman i was going to ask you about the connection between your worldview and hoffman's hoffman is taking that in a metaphysical direction and uh and saying so there's no reason to so you should you should carry the doubt about uh whether your perception is yielding a true view of things to a very fundamental level right you you to to to to the the question of whether the stuff out there is even stuff i mean the metaphor he uses is that you know when you look at when i look at my computer screen there's this little trash bin that represents you know deleting it's the place i pull things to delete them there's all these icons but of course the computer's operating system doesn't have icons icons are a convenient uh simplification of aspects of the operating system in a certain sense and and so in this metaphor uh the code is closer to being the real world and the icons closer being what we perceive now i was going to ask you what is the correspondence between your view and hoffman's because it seems to me he's still not being an idealist right i think he's outright an idealist i know don personally does he say he's an idealist does he say he's an idealist conscious agents are mental agents and he says all that all that exists are conscious agent so he's certainly a a form of he endorses a form of idealism okay i think dawn i think you're correct that the basic intuitions behind what he's saying have been around uh platinga has said something to that effect decades ago uh plantinga i said it decades ago it's really been out there a long time and i was not original i was quoting people but but i think what he did that is important in innovative and original is that he brought mathematical rigor to this he applied gain theory to this and he has proven theorems about this so it's not just an intuition anymore it it's a proven fact that that's what evolution would do he did that through simulations and through mathematical theorems so i i wouldn't minimize the importance and the originality of what he added to the discussion oh no i mean carrying it in a physical direction is very interesting but but as for illustrating the general fact that the evolved brain will not necessarily give you an accurate view of the world i ask him flat out why did you bother with the simulation it follows logically from the theory of natural selection but anyway we can leave that aside we can leave that aside the the um uh so so would you embrace that the part of his metaphor i described i don't it doesn't seem to me you would want to put it the way i put it because the way i put it is still like uh you know we are the uh well we are the agents we are the we are the kind of uh well you tell me do are you totally happy with that computer metaphor yes i am and i think the mistake we tend to make and that's psychologically very very understandable is that we don't dare draw the full range of implications that certain realizations certain scientific facts have we tend to be cautious about how far we draw the implications because we want to hold on to the current narrative we have about what's going on otherwise we would be sort of you know free-falling we wouldn't we would feel disconnected to everything that has given us a certain sense of control about the game we are playing so the implications of research but done by for instance carl fristen in the uk and donald hoffman in the u.s people draw only very mild implications from that like they explain why when you have a rotating mask why the back of the mask is perceived as the same as the front of the mask because we sort of infer faces and faces are protruding out that's why we see the inner side of the mask as if it were protruding out as well when in fact it's the opposite that's going on or just as you said you know we overestimate the the the speed of objects coming to us but we think they're still objects and we think they're they still have the geometrical relationships that they seem to have and we think there are still masks even if we see them wrongly there's two masks and some geometrical relationships are still preserved and we don't realize that if these two gentlemen amongst many others if what they've proven mathematically carl fristan has proven the inferential mind mathematically as well it's very difficult to follow the proof but if you spend a couple of days on it you convince yourself that he is right the the true implications of that if we acknowledge those implications without bias without trying to stick to some form of what we already believed uh you realize that the implications go much further than what people admit and i think the merit of dawn carl i still haven't seen him biting that bullet all the way but the merit of dawn is that he was impartial and objective enough to say okay if what i've proven is true then there are more things i have to abandon about my belief systems than just the part that i'm comfortable to abandon then i really have what i really have is a sort of a desktop and not a view of the world as it is in itself i only have a desktop representation because that's what the mathematics and the theory is telling me and that's what the experiments are telling me and the same with carl fristan and and the idea that perception fundamentally limits entropy by encoding and turning perception into an inferential encoded process as opposed to a mirror of the states of the world the implication is that even what we call a brain has now to be taken with a whole bag of salt there may not be such a thing as a brain with the shapes that we perceive the brain in perception is a representation of something that really does exist is really out there it's for real it doesn't depend on us it doesn't depend on whether we believe it or not whether we like it or not it's really out there and it does look like a brain when we perceive but the thing in and of itself if you could peek through a transparent window as opposed to looking at the dashboard only the thing in itself probably doesn't look at all like a brain it's something totally incommensurable with the brain so if you believe these theoretical implications there is no middle ground sorry if you believe these theoretical conclusions and proofs there is no middle ground you cannot abandon only 10 of your belief system you have to be objective impartial and see what the full range of implications are and i think don has been very courageous in doing that and i take my hat off to him let me ask you another version of uh the question well an extension of the question i asked you about the appeal of materialist account of natural selection like it makes sense all the way up right uh from from strand of replicating uh physical information to human beings let me let me put it this way i guess people might say okay you're saying that's not what's fundamental the brain is not what's fundamental what's fundamental is consciousness and the body is not what's fundamental what's fundamental is consciousness and what you're calling the brain and the body are mere you know kind of surface manifestations of that consciousness as perceived from other kind of realms kind of dissociated realms of consciousness or something i i guess the question might arise like well okay first of all i mean again it is a little harder for me to conceive of uh so so something is changing in consciousness as evolution happens right the something about the structure of consciousness is changing as evolution happens and again from the point of view of materials it seems like kind of vague and mushy and something that's hard to think about but in any event it's kind of interesting that you would you would say i presume that consciousness is is evolving in accordance with some kind of laws uh i guess uh but if you said that it sounds like you're about getting ready to tell me you wouldn't put it quite like that but many men let me let me let me uh i mean just judging by your your uh positioning of your repositioning of the surface manifestation of your consciousness otherwise known as your body the um uh let me just say that uh i guess the materials would say well okay even granted that there's some explanation for why consciousness is moving in this form that is that entails these ever more elaborate physical structures it's isn't it kind of a weird coincidence that uh that the narrative at the physicalist materialist level kind of works so well so to speak on its own terms you know what i mean it's like it's like it doesn't it's like well no it does i mean i mean now look let me grant let me say something i'm totally open-minded on consciousness because i don't think anybody has a has a satisfactory explanation okay i don't mean i don't mean that evolution does a good job of explaining consciousness i guess well your version of evolution but what i mean is i i when i say i don't think there's a satisfactory view of uh consciousness what i mean is okay there's the upper phenomenalist view which is intuitively appealing to me which is the idea that uh consciousness has the relationship to your body that a shadow the shadow of my hand has to my hand in other words the real action is the hand the shadow is just a shadow it doesn't affect anything it is affected by the physical doesn't affect anything okay epiphenomenalism makes sense to me but an epiphenomenologist then has to explain what consciousness is for because certainly until the advent of human beings who talk about conscious who talk about subjective states it was having no function it was it was by definition having no function so that that's kind of unsatisfactory and then all the other things interactive dualism you know a limited whatever they call it whatever the dan dennis calls this thing which is totally unintelligible to me illusionism well that's his latest version uh but but it's basically eleminativism eliminativism right the um so i just want to say i'm very open-minded uh and i'm not ruling out your view precisely because i don't think anyone has solved the problem but that said i do think natural selection if you just leave out the subjective experience part and don't ask it to explain that but just ask it to explain the physical structure of us and how we came to be it is a really powerful explanation that works really well on its own terms and i'm just saying like i'm i'm like well isn't it kind of a hell of a coincidence that you're saying this the physical uh level isn't where the real action is and yet it's such a good narrative it's such a compelling theory right you know we're seeing contradictions where there are none so bear with me there is there is a lot to unpack here um the explanatory power of scientific models is what we have to credit with success that's what works evolution by natural selection i would go as far i know many would disagree with me but come on it is bloody proven we know it happens there are even experiments with bacteria that you can run on a large evolutionary chain some might say well you don't get really speciation yes but we can compare you know the the genetic codes of different organisms and we clearly see an evolutionary tree we know that species arise from other species through the accrual of genetic mutation this is a very powerful explanatory account of the structure of life do i deny that not at all i subscribe to evolution i don't think the mutations are random and actually since the last two years we have now compelling evidence that their mutations are not random that they are biased we don't know yet why that is the case or how that can be the case but there are there are winning explanations as to how it could come to be the case but in the so-called evolution of evolvability but go ahead okay so is there doubt that this explanatory account is successful that this account for how the evolution how the structure of life complex structure of life has come to be is successful no there is no doubt at all about the success of this account should we credit this to materialism no materialism is a metaphysics it's not an explanatory scientific model it's not predicting the configurations of nature it's telling you tentatively what nature is not what it does what it does is the scientific account how did nature do us how did nature do our structure there is a scientific account for that called evolution that it's almost well i would say so far as to say it's certainly true but okay it's almost certainly true and the credit for that goes to science not to materialism as a metaphysics materialism in the minds of scientists is a working hypothesis that allows them to have a relationship with the subject of their studies is a way of thinking about nature it is not a scientific model it's a way of thinking about things idealism is as compatible with evolution as materialism because idealism would say okay the first alter in other words a biogenesis the first living being that arose from non-living things that remains a mystery under idealism just as it is under materialism and whatever account materialism would have for that whatever account science would have for that idealism would almost certainly be compatible with that but that initial alter was very simple very simple dissociated mentation why did that very simple dissociated mentation eventually turn into very complex dissociated mentation like us with our higher level mental functions metacognition explicit introspection all that stuff we have well because the alters along the history of life on this planet for three and a half four billion years they have to react to environmental pressures and it was that needs the pressure of natural selection that has led to more complex outers that could stay that could stay alters for longer more effectively in other words it could survive and reproduce so you're giving credit to materialism which is a metaphysics when you should be giving credit to science which fundamentally is agnostic of metaphysics um yeah i mean i accept that i i guess you what you might say is that i'm trapped in a dualistic framework and that that's the the uh the underlying fallacy in my question right like i insist on seeing an outer and an inner and and asking you why did the two correspond and because what is the appearance of the other you're saying the outer is the appearance of the inner exactly so substance dualism is is is a very let me put it mildly it's a very difficult thing to defend do you want to define that to people for people just in case they i mean substance dualism being mainly kind of what we think about as dualism consciousness is this stuff materials stuff is this stuff and then they have some kind of relationship is that what you mean by substantialism substance dualism is the idea that there are at least two kinds of two types of existence in nature that are totally incommensurable with one another so there is uh there is uh res extensa okay there is extended stuff for matter physical stuff and then there is soul stuff which is not physical at all and these two are fundamentally independent of one another but they interact in some way now this idea is extraordinarily difficult to defend and i think we have no reason to take it seriously but there is another form of dualism that is not substance dualism it's a different kind of dualism there are many dualisms in nature past and future here and there there are all kinds of dualisms if nature is extended this is another form of dualism the inner and outer there is the inner conscious experience and there is what that inner conscious experience looks like when observed from the outside which is also a conscious experience um so that kind of dualism exists but we you're correct that we insist on thinking in dualistic terms in the in in the substance sense for instance when i tell people that everything is mined people rush to tell me that well no if you are undergoing brain surgery and the surgeon stimulates your brain here and there that causally leads to a conscious effect you experience something because the neurosurgeon was poking around your brain so that's an instance of material causation so matter has to precede the experience because a material process caused an experience well they are presupposing dualism while idealism is not a dualism they are thinking of the the surgeon's electric probe that pokes around your brain as something outside consciousness while under idealism the probe is also what a transpersonal mental process looks like and that transpersonal mental process impinges on a personal mental process namely your inner experience leading to an effect now that one type of mental process causes an effect in another type of mental process is trivial our thoughts leads to changes in our emotions and the other way around all the time mental processes of different kinds causally interact with one another leading to mental effects and there is nothing mysterious about this so the alcohol you drink that changes your inner life uh the guy who punches you in the head and changes your conscience in their life or the surgeon that goes poking around your brain and changes your conscience in their life the surgeon with the probe the alcohol the pill you swallow with the psychedelic all these things too are images of transpersonal mental processes that interfere with the mental processes going on within your dissociative boundary something the mental processes process on the outside interfering it seems like there's a kind of two different things going on i mean when the guy punches you in your face the face i can see you saying that's just your consciousness bumping into his or your your realm of your your little chunk of the universal consciousness bumping into his little chunk of the universal consciousness but when i take a drug i mean the drug is you're not you're not saying the drug or are you saying the drug it the drug itself you would say is a manifestation of the universal consciousness the drug is what a certain mental process in the mind of nature if you will yeah looks like in the same way that if somebody takes a brain scan of your brain activity right now there will be pockets of activity here and there in different places different mental processes going on in your brain the pill that you take is just like one of those mental processes in the mind of nature and if you swallow it of course that mental process will interfere with your personal mental processes leading to a mental effect it's augmentation but there is an inner and an altar and all the cause of change that we have modeled through science still hold what is the alternative robert the alternative is materialism it's it's telling you that the pill you see doesn't exist it's engendered by your brain it is epi phenomenal but there is something out there that corresponds to the pill and that something is purely abstract now if you're talking about things that are vague and mushy materialism is a lot more vague and mushy because it doesn't even tell you what the pill is it's pure abstraction while idealism is telling you well it's what the mental process looks like okay well it's much more concrete but but uh there there are kind of two different two different things here in terms of what the pill what materialism tells you the pill is like intuitive what you would call naive materialism just tells you no it's a physical pill that it makes total sense it's like the wall there's this physical stuff maybe what you mean is that science is now telling us that at the bottom of the physical world it's all abstraction we never find the physical stuff it's like particles have subatomic particles what do those have what are they are they particles are they waves well i don't know there's these convenient abstractions but right i mean are you saying that science is telling the the scientific description of the of the physical world boils down to abstractions because i think the average person's intuitive apprehension of the physical world doesn't run into that problem it's just physical it's material it's hard it does okay no i'm not saying that science is the thing doing it science is agnostic of what the world is the theoretical entities that arise from scientific investigation are convenient fictions in other words nature behaves as though those convenient fictions were true but throughout the history of science we have changed those convenient fictions because science is not married to a narrative about what the world is science is only interested in what the world does how nature behaves right so newton had this uh convenient fiction of gravity being a force that acts instantaneously at a distance it took the french 50 years to stop laughing of newton because that looked that sounded like magic woo instantaneous invisible forces acting at the distance what the hell is that einstein had the same view of it uh einstein when it comes to gravity einstein is the one who who who showed that newton's convenient fiction was no longer convenient based on what right that's what i mean he he viewed newtonian's conceptions of gravity as quote spooky action at a distance right no no no spooky action of a distance was applied to quantum maintenance that came much later that was in the 1920s uh so that that's something else no what einstein showed is that newton's convenient fiction of an invisible force acting at a distance couldn't account for certain observations for instance the orbit of mercury and certain things that were going on the photoelectric effects so he replaced that convenient fiction instead of saying that nature behaves as though an invisible force acting at a distance existed nature behaves as though space and time is a fabric that can be bent and twisted so that's our current convenience and then the causality is happening at via proximity be a direct kind of contact in a certain sense no no the causality happens because mass bends the fabric right but what i mean what i meant was einstein found the idea of spooky action we don't need to get off on this much but einstein found notions of spooky action at addiction at a distance implausible he solved that problem with gravity and wanted to rule it out at the quantum level by saying that entanglement wouldn't happen uh and that we now think he was wrong about that you know that's a whole and we should be right now i mean there may be there may be a version of quantum physics we want to get into if we have time but let me let me try to answer your previous question because i was still still trying to get there so science is about nature's behavior and convenient fictions and those convenient fictions are convenient because nature seems to behave as though they existed but there is no fundamental scientific commitment to the fictions that for instance we now found the higgs boson do you know what the higgs boson is the higgs boson is a bump on an energy histogram the higgs boson as a particle is a convenient fiction too we never measure the higgs boson directly it decays before it interacts with measurement surfaces what we measure is what it decays into it's the footprints of the higgs but it is very convenient to imagine that there is a little particle that we call the higgs boson because nature behaves as though it existed right i agree the the problem is not a scientific problem the problem that you're alluding to you know how the the the narrative that the pill really exists as a physical object that's not a scientific problem that's a metaphysical problem of materialism um but imagine that the peel is white we tend to think that under materialism a white pill really exists out there but it doesn't because materialism says the whiteness is created by your brain inside your skull it's one of the qualities of experience and the brain generates experience so there is no white pill out there what is out there is pure abstraction under idealism there is also no real white people out there because the white pill is what's displayed on your dashboard and your dashboard is in your personal mind within your dissociative boundary but there is a mental process out there that corresponds to the white pill there is a mental process whose image on the dashboard is a white pill and that's much more concrete than the pure abstraction of physicalism so as far as mushiness and vagueness goes materialism it takes the crown here by a large a large margin okay let me approach this from a different angle and this is maybe uh useful for people who want to doubt your your claim that your worldview is entirely compatible uh with science um you know i mean i don't i'm not like an historian of philosophy by any means but i i think there's an interesting thing about you know the kind of the the the so-called empiricists right the british empiricists uh and so on like like uh david hume i i think the the first you know uh the first few things you hear about them might lead you to think of them as very kind of hard-nosed scientific and they are they are that's true but um but at the same because they were saying well you know one thing i i think empiricis well there's a version of empiricism that says look we have to confine our discussion to what we can really see like what we can really observe all we have to to work with is what we can see what's out there don't don't get too like mystical with me let's just focus on kind of the facts but but really hume for example uh was much more epistemically humble you might say than that suggests in in in the sense uh i mean for example he was skeptical of our conception of causality itself okay that's an example but the point i want to make is if if you really if you really start out saying look all we have access to is our perceptions of the world that does naturally lead you to and has led some empiricists to i think a kind of radical doubt about the world out there right because you realize i don't know if this is making sense but i mean it may to you but it was making sense to anybody else if it is uh you realize that um yeah all you know i mean it's kind of a cartesian kind of doubt it's like all you know is what the world seems like to you those are the only facts you have access to you will never have direct facts about the world quote out there because all you you know even in the kind of you might say materialist description of perception is what's impinging well you don't even know what's impinging on you you you know you know what it feels like to be this thing that stuff is impinging on right i mean uh you do you do you want to say anything about the empiricists and you know but i i consider myself an extreme empiricist that's my point that's my point yeah i also subscribe extremely maybe unreasonably to octan's razor the idea of that the best theories are the parsimonious ones i mean that's why i'm an idealist because nature's given the only thing that nature gives you as a as a fact is the existence of mental stuff that's what you have when you're a five-year-old year old kid before you start theorizing and telling yourself other things that's what you have when you're born it's mental stuff your perceptions are mental stuff they have qualities colors flavors this is mental stuff it's not physical stuff this is the stuff that is supposed to be generated by your brain under materialism but what we are given is mental stuff anything else is a theory is a guess um so from that perspective i am with the british empiricists if you if you want me to speak a little more specifically about david hume hume said that even the mind is not empirically given because all we have is mental processes it's particular experiences it's that thought it's that pain it's that red but the mind underlying it doesn't exist and of course what he meant because that was the context of this his time is that there isn't such a thing as a soul some kind of gaseous substance that floats from one body to another or whatever uh that inhabits a body yeah that that stuff is not available to empirical experience indeed but mentation as a kind of existence as an ontological category to speak technically that is a given there may not be a discrete soul but mind stuff exists because any experience is an instance thereof now how far can we take our empirical skepticism well the most extreme position is solipsism which is the only thing i know to exist is my personal experience everything else is a fiction therefore all reality is my personal dream and the other people i see in my life they are creations of my own mind there is nothing it is like to be other people they exist only in so far as the images i engender and perceive because my mind is creating them in a form of cosmic personal dream now do i think that is reasonable no i think that's completely unreasonable as as russell said not even solipsists act consistently with the view that they subscribe to imagine a conference of solipsists like alan watts once uh uh joked you know a conference of people who think they are the only thing that exists and all the other people are in their imagination if you are a consistent solipsist you don't even talk about solipsism because everything is just in the creations of your mind i think we if we are reasonable we cannot avoid the influence that there is a world outside our minds a world that we do not have direct access to through personal mentation a world that we need to infer and try to accumulate knowledge through empirical and theoretical inference and then the question is what is the most parsimonious inferences that we can make what are the most expensive explanatory powerful inferences we can make the most empirically adequate uh the most internally consistent inferences we can make about what that external world is and i would submit to you that on all of the enlightenment values you know parsimony internal consistency and pericle adequacy and so on and so forth idealism wins them all um because mentality mentation is the kind of stuff that is given so if there is a world outside me then it's most reasonable and parsimonious to say it's just mormentation it's not my mentation but it's more of the same kind so you mean mentation is the only thing we can be sure exists that's the only thing we observe directly it's it's right it's like that's kind of what i am i mean subjective experience i can confidently assert exists but beyond that there's nothing we can say with confidence so you're saying it's it's it's in a sense the simplest assumption is that that's all there is kind of that's the most skeptical i no the most skeptical idea is solipsism is that all that exists is the orientation you know i didn't mean i didn't mean that well what i mean i i meant is the appeal of your worldview not solipsism but idealism and your in your version of idealism uh that i can uh it doesn't cause me to assume the existence of anything uh that's fundamentally different from what i know for sure exists i know for sure subjective experience exists i know for sure consciousness exists and the appeal of your worldview is i don't have to posit the existence of holy new metaphysical categories correct it's just more of the same stuff that you know exists so i the idealist says i can see the earth until the horizon in other words my personal mentation in the metaphor but i acknowledge that the earth continues beyond the horizon but then i would say beyond the horizon is just more earth it's more of the same kind of stuff that they can directly be acquainted with the materialists will say until the horizon it's mentation beyond the horizon it's not the earth anymore it's something totally else i think that violates parsimony this would be a materialism would be more reasonable if we could not make sense of the facts by extrapolating meditation if that were impossible then you are justified in making an extra inference postulating more theoretical entities but i would argue and that's what i've been doing for the past 15 years that you don't need that more mentation does the job especially given the empirical reality of dissociation as a psychiatric phenomenon in mind that we have for the past 20 20 years or so a kind of certainty and understanding we didn't have in the 20th century so i think under occam's razor idealism is better in terms of explanatory power idealism is better because what phys what materialism does it postulates this extra entity matter outside an independent augmentation and then tries to reduce meditation to it and fails that's the heart problem of consciousness what idealism says is well beyond the horizon it's more mentation and mentation is the ontological primitive you cannot reduce one thing to another or explain one thing in terms of another forever at some point you hit rock bottom the game is can you explain everything else in terms of that one thing and idealism i think succeeds in explaining everything else all the dynamics of nature in terms of mind so it doesn't need to reduce mind materialism tries to reduce all of nature to matter and then fails to reduce experience to matter which which is in a sense all we have all we have is experience otherwise it's just nothing no what we don't experience might not might as well not exist so in terms of explanatory power materialism fails materialism fails empirical adequacy uh um the the experimental uh confirmation of bells and leggett's inequalities in quantum physics uh refute the idea that physical entities have standalone existence unless you are entertaining the fantasies of super determinism or the many worlds interpretation all this ridiculous stuff that that's gaining some level of plausibility today it's the scientific woo-woo that you see around if you don't want to go that way the way of fantasy then i would say foundations of physics have now refuted the standalone existence of physical stuff so physical stuff cannot be primary so materialism is inadequate when it comes to empirical data as well and it could go on and so forth and go on and on materialism is internally inconsistent it defines matter as that which has nothing to do with experience and then it tries to reduce experience to matter it's like what why are you trying to do that mistakes descriptions for the things in themselves well the numbers that we define matter in terms of mass charge momentum amplitude frequency those numbers are descriptions of experiences but then materialism says oh they all that exists is the description well i i mean the experience comes out of that pulling the territory out of the map i mean certainly a limit of materialism is probably subject to that criticism i i think of there being a version of materialism it just says look i don't know consciousness is an unsolved problem but i know that when i imagine the world out there as being this physical stuff i get good results now you would say you don't need to think of it as material to do good science and that's just a mistake in conflation on people's part but i'm sure this is a reaction uh you get and and and i'd have to think more about uh whose side i'm on in that argument because i haven't thought about it before but you brought you you alluded to quantum physics when you brought up many worlds and many worlds is one way of responding to an issue that arises in in quantum physics and a a a kind of experimental well again i'm not a physicist anymore than i'm a philosopher but the the basic idea i gather is that you know there is reason to believe that in quantum physics um well you know there is this collapse of the so-called collapse of the wave function uh right like if you ask well where is this this subatomic particle or what is its velocity or something a common answer from quantum physics is that well there is no definite answer right now all we can say is that there's a probability that it has this position or velocity there's this probability it has this one now if you measure it you will get a definite answer at that point but that doesn't you shouldn't be so naive as to think that that was the answer before you measured it right i mean that's kind of this is what quantum physicists uh tell us and i think the mini world's interpretation is a way of saying well in your world when you measured it it collapsed onto this answer but at the same point some other world was created where the answer was that or something anyway many worlds is one response to this problem now do you think that your worldview has a more satisfactory accommodation of this whole problem with the wave so-called collapsing upon measurement there's a lot to unpack here so so bear with me let's start from the basics so people can follow uh what we're going to be talking about the problem is the following quantum physics we have two different processes one is linear and deterministic the other one is non-linear and appears to be non-deterministic the the the well-known one is called schrodinger's equation or the wave function we understand that very well empirically we know that nature behaves exactly as predicted by the wave function the problem is that the wave function only tell us probabilities if you make a measurement it will tell you the probability of finding a b or c upon measurement but it doesn't tell you exactly what will appear upon measurement it just gives you probabilities and those probabilities spread out in space and across time in a very well understood linear way we can compute the probabilities of anything being observed anywhere in space or in time if we have the appropriate wave function and theoretically there is no reason why we shouldn't have the appropriate wave function it may be in practice too complex many times but there is no theoretical reason why it shouldn't be in principle available the problem is the next process that's the observation problem the measurement problem in physics which is once you make a measurement you don't get a probability you get a definite result so if you throw a coin uh you can calculate the probabilities that it will be heads or tail as 50 50 fifty percent for one fifty percent of the other but when you measure it will be either heads or tails not half half heads and half tails um and that is the measurement problem now some people um including some very well-known physicists like shan caro they conflate the notion of parsimony which is a non-tech notion we have to be parsimonious about what we think really exists out there now we shouldn't postulate that there is a flying spaghetti monster moving the celestial bodies around their orbits because we don't need to postulate that we can make sense of that by postulating less so that's okan's razor the principle of parsimony about what exists in nature but some physicists they con conflate this principle with epistemic parsimony and they say well because i understand the wave function and i don't understand the measurement function the the problem of the measurement problem of the collapse or the weight of the wave function which is popular metaphor i will then say that the collapse doesn't exist and that everything in the envelope of probabilities of the wave function actually exists and that's more parsimonious because then i stick to only the equation i know and the part i don't know i say it doesn't exist that's epistemic parsimony but ontoly speaking it's the least parsimonious thing you can ever conceive because you're basically saying that everything that can happen actually does happen in some of gazillion parallel universes that pop out of nothing for no reason every infinitesimal fraction of a second for which we have precisely zero empirical evidence because you want to to to restrict what nature is based on what you know it's like looking for your lost car keys uh under the light even though you don't you don't have any reason to think you lost your car keys there just because you can see there i mean this is ridiculous it's it's such a logical fallacy to think that nature should conform to the limitations of our knowledge and to do that by saying that nature basically does everything that can possibly happen given the limitations of our knowledge about what actually happens or doesn't it's just ridiculous so that that's how the many worlds interpretation arises it's it's a misunderstanding of the concept of parsimony applying it to our knowledge as opposed to applying it to nature and it ends up reversing the value of parsimony the menu world's interpretation is the least parsimonious thought that can ever be conceived by a coherent human mind to say that everything that can happen actually does now there is guys interject even among physicists there's the law uh going way back i'm not sure if eugene vigner was one of these maybe i'm getting him mixed up with somebody else but but there have been physicists going way back who said uh the reason that the definite you get a definite measurement when you measure is that the observer the conscious observer is kind of forcing reality to assume definite form so there have been people who now again this remains a kind of dualistic framework maybe from your point of view but there have been people who suggested that consciousness actually plays a cause well some kind of uh a forceful role in bringing reality into existence right now you're not exactly that view probably but you probably find it more interesting than multi-world many worlds it's motivated by a legitimate observation but i think it but it's not your part okay no because it grants consciousness look it that's wigner's interpretation or the consciousness causes collapse interpretation which was motivated by the mathematical work done by john von neumann and john von neumann said that whatever material entities interact they don't perform a measurement they just become entangled so when you bring a measurement apparatus to a quantum system and perform a management that requires an interaction between the measurement apparatus and the thing you're measuring and upon interaction they would just become entangled with each other and there will be no collapse well but we observe a definite answer not a not waves of murky probabilities so but every time you draw that equation further you have more and more and more entanglement all the way into the retinas of our eyes which are also material things that they too should become entangled therefore only consciousness can cause collapse that's that's the motivation for weakness wigner's interpretation i think what this shows us is not that consciousness magically changes the state of a world outside consciousness that is like granting phenomenal superpowers to a restricted view of consciousness what it is telling us is that there is no world outside of consciousness and that the way function is epstemic it it's the sum total of our knowledge about that world in a transpersonal form of subjectivity it's the best description we can make about what those transpersonal mental processes will be doing how they will be behaving but they we are not at the point yet to to say what particular reality will be registered as a mental process upon the interaction of a dissociated altar of consciousness and the non-dissociated transpersonal mental processes out there so it's an it's a question of knowledge not a question of reality in my view but the most interesting part of this whole discussion which transcends all the many worlds discussion is the following when you do have two entangled particles and you perform a measurement on one say particle wave and maybe we we should say that entangled as i understand entanglement it's like you have these two particles they're they're together but even if you if you separate them and they start flying apart um they they continue to have a relationship that it's not just because they were in the same state at the beginning and so naturally they're you know they change at the same rate and so remain in sync in that sense there's something maybe we need to get into because it's so subtle but uh it amounts to in some sense uh i think you could say influencing influence uh happening across distances instantaneously in some sense uh or anyway we don't we don't just mean entanglement in a true in a really trivial mundane sense there is this concept in physics that that seems pretty weird but go ahead so entanglement means that you cannot describe the behavior of one particle independently of the behavior of the other their behaviors are entangled even though they are separate across the fabric of space-time they are not in the same place they are far away actually experiments have been done now in which they are 10 kilometers apart so they are entangled in a technical sense they are not physically together but their behavior is such that you cannot describe what one will do independently of what the other does what they do depends on what the other does that's entanglement so if you take one of these entangled particles say a and have alice perform a measurement on particle a and bob performs a measurement on particle b at the same time as alice does but far away you know on the other side of the planet the other side of the universe what you will see is that what alice chooses to measure about particle a will determine or it will directly influence what bob sees when he measures particle b alice's choice instantaneously influences what bob sees on on his particle now what alice chooses to observe is a certain physical property and particles are defined in terms of their physical properties in other words a particle is the sum total of its physical properties so if alice's choice of what to see defines what particle b is what alice chooses to measure about particle a changes what particle b is then we cannot say that particle a and b as physical entities existed before measurement because it's the measurement alice does that determines what particle b on the other side of the universe is and what this tells us is that physical properties in other words what defines physicality materiality they they do not have standalone existence they didn't exist prior to measurement they are the appearance of a deeper layer of reality that presents itself to measurement in the form of what we call physicality but physicality because it's the appearance upon measurement of a deeper layer of reality physicality doesn't exist prior to measurement of course not it's for the same reason that if you're looking at the dashboard of an airplane but you turn off the sensors you will see nothing on the dashboard the dials will show you nothing no measurement is being performed the dashboard shows nothing that doesn't mean that the world out there doesn't exist of course it does it's just not the dashboard it's the thing that is measured in order to be displayed on the dashboard so what these experiments are telling us is that the world as it is in itself the thing measured is not physical physicality is what appears on the dashboard upon measurement and it correlates reliably with the world as it is in itself in the same sense that the dials on the cockpit of an airplane give you accurate information about what's going on outside enough that you can fly safely by instruments alone but we should not say that the world is the dashboard yeah that's stupid it's silly you're you're mistaking the whole thing the world is not physical for the same reason that it is not the dashboard and that's why physical properties don't exist until you measure there's nothing on the dashboard until your sensor makes a measurement that doesn't mean that there is no world that there is no nothing being measured of course there is it's just not physical it's a deeper layer of reality um let me ask you does you know there are people who take the phenomena of entanglement and say whoa so that means like uh it could be that you know telepathy is happening like i'm i'm feeling the thoughts of somebody in china right now or various weird is happening and physicists say no no no you're going too far i'm just wondering does your view of the situation leave more room for weird to happen via the kinds of dynamics we see in entanglement from a scientific perspective no i don't think entanglement in and of itself gives us reason to to entertain certain hypotheses because entanglement it's a very well defined kind of thing um entangled systems don't survive interaction with the environment um they they the information that is contained in that superposition of states the entangled state sort of leaks into the classical environments to the point of not being perceivable anymore it gets diluted into the environment we call it the coherence so it's difficult to appeal to quantum physics alone to justify telepathy does that mean that i don't think telepathy can happen no i think it can happen but not because of quantum entanglement i think telepathy can happen because no process in nature is perfect rain never eliminates all air humidity fire never burns everything that can be combusted no process in nature is perfect so if life if our individual minds are a dissociative process that prevents us from reading each other's thoughts because we are dissociated from one another then that dissociation too probably isn't bulletproof it's probably not completely perfect there probably is some kind of traffic across the dissociative boundary it may be in some sense um things can percolate through it see what i mean it it's not a completely tight perfect seal it's not waterproof i think there is good reason to think that it is not and that occasionally one could have felt impressions that are true about something that is happening beyond perceptual range i have had it i i the girl my girlfriend who lives with me been together for nine years um she regularly has it and it has how does it show up like what kinds of things she she she says to call somebody and says i know what you were just thinking and she's right that happens between us all the time that happens between you well yeah but that can happen because you know somebody so well right no no no it happens look i i'm critical enough to know that sometimes it happens because we were both sort of triggered by the same external event right that we were observing and we made the same cognitive associations to something and we knew what we were thinking because of that trivial line of cognitive associations so i know how to filter this stuff out you know when you're prompted to a thought together with somebody else and you think you're reading each other's thoughts but no you both independently arrived at that thought because you were prompted by the same external cue but there are things that i i can't dismiss can i tell you a story is it totally okay there was once a few years ago we were on holidays in the countryside in germany she's from germany um and we were sort of far away from civilization that's what we wanted to do we wanted to be a weak really off the grid and we were far away um and we were away from phone lines we had our mobile phones but she was with me all the time i knew she was not using it one day in the morning she wakes up and said wow i had the weirdest dream and i was already awake before she woke up uh and asked her so what dream and then she said well i dreamed that my grandmother was alive at the time was in hospital with a bandage in her head some kind of head injury and that my two aunts grandmother's daughters were with her in the hospital and my grandmother was telling me mentally that she was okay and that was just this this static picture nothing happening just this tactic static picture the grandmother with the bandaged head and the two sisters in the hospital and the grandmother suggesting mentally i am okay and i i know i'm a student of jung so i like sometimes i i guess a dream interpretation but i couldn't place this one because it was so static and then in a sort of an interview you couldn't interpret it you couldn't come up with an interpretation of what yeah because it was static it was like a picture and a mental impression i couldn't interpret that and but i was triggered it's a peculiar dream usually in dreams stuff happens and then i suggested don't you want to call your father just to ask for news and then she sort of got spooked he picked up her phone and called her father and her father told her the story her grandmother grandmother had had a um a stroke had a brain stroke so she had like within the last 24 hours or something yeah just just that that night that in the wee hours of that night roughly when she was having the dream uh before i think an hour or two before yeah and um and she was in hospital and her dad's two sisters her aunts were there with her grandmother but the doctor had already said that she was uh out of the woods that there was no longer a life risk and we were floored now i i can't make sense of that uh in in in the in classical terms uh all i can say is use my own view of reality and think you know her grandmother and my girlfriend um heard their dissociative boundaries was porous um you know in the wee hours of the morning when you're still sleepy your dissociative boundary spores you don't have that assertion of the ego yet and and something got through some some mental process got through bypassed uh perceptual uh channels now what a skeptic would say of course is well so much stuff happens in the world there's going to be weird coincidences and somewhere in the world when you look at how many people there are and how many dreams there are it's just going to happen that somebody gets it right now right so that that's what you'd hear now maybe that you have experiences like this with such regularity that we're really we're really kind of pushing it's kind of pushing uh you know credibility to think that it would be coincidence maybe that's your view but but what is your what is your response to questions like that too i think the criticism you just related i think it's a lot of the times valid i would go as far as to say in the massive majority of times what we see as you know spooky things is just stuff that at some point has to happen like some people uh think that it's very special that often they look at the clock when all the digits are the same like 22 22 or 11 11 and they think that some message from some transcendent realm i don't think so i think we look at the clock so many times a day that we are it's bound to happen that every now and then all digits will be the same so i i do take heed from that criticism i take it seriously i think it's very valid but when this stuff happens to you with certain irregularities it does pushes credulity i mean michael schermer our common friend he had one of these experiences had happened with his wife like the radio that supposedly wasn't working and suddenly was and uh yeah um and he of course founded the magazine the skeptic uh and and this is a skeptic but he seems to be kind of taking seriously i mean apparently that really got his attention i would say i've never had a dream that worked out like that and and you know if we're going to look at this scientifically i have to be part of the database right so you have to add that in like so between you and me we have per person half as many of these weird things as as per person as we we did before we include me in the database i don't think my wife has so that brings it down to a third you know you know what i mean i mean yeah now but but your view i guess your view must be um [Music] but you know here's the thing i've always wondered you know i remember there was this woman i was at a conference at esselen once which is i don't know if you know about eslan but it's you know kind of borderline and there was a woman from some association that i i think her name was marilyn schlitz or something and she was a uh a believer in this kind of stuff but she was telling me things that i thought well this should be experimentally verifiable if there are these special people like i think she was saying people at music schools gifted musicians tend to have certain kinds of kind of paranormal gifts or something and i thought like well then do the damn experiment i mean you know go get the this subgroup of people do the controlled experiments uh and and so on i mean why i take it your view is there are people who have you might be too humble to call it a gift if you're one of the people but i take it your view is that there are people who are more susceptible to this kind of experience yeah should it be possible to get them all together and do a bunch of experiments to convince the world i think there are we make some intrinsic assumptions when we talk of experiments um in an experiment you have to control for the experimental conditions you have to control for whatever might be influencing the experiment that doesn't belong in the experiment you have to instrument the participant with an eeg cap or make these skin con conduction methods and you are in a clinical setting and now those things have a psychological impact on the people participating in the experiment there is one major thing as simple as the fact that they are being expected to have this kind of non-ordinary experiences uh on request at a certain time at a certain place and so the very experimental procedure has an effect on the psychology of the participants when you're doing an experiment on bacteria or on minerals you don't need to worry about this but when you are doing an experiment on people and the desired observation is a cognition of these people then of course the entire experimental procedure will affect whether okay you can observe the your hypothesis are not uh what you see is that at least anecdotally anecdotally um i understand that most of these experiences are not prompted they don't come on demand they arise because of some kind of emotional dynamics um so they cannot be conjured up into reality uh um on demand like do this now it doesn't work like that and in fact if you put people in an experimental setting you may be drastically reducing the chance that the thing you want to observe can be observed at all you will be excluding it merely by controlling the experiment so i don't think it's experimentally trivial to do what you're saying um it's something that may happen in the world but not under control that's sad yeah that's sad people like jean ray um jim raiden no uh i forget his name i think uh dean dean rayden okay people like dean rayden have done experiments like this and they have observed the effect it's small uh but it is statistically significant and i think that's intriguing okay uh let me ask you and i take it by the way that things as weird or almost as weird as the story you just described have happened much more than once involving you and your girlfriend or something thanks is the most significant underwear of the number of elements the two sisters the hospital a head injury the timing it's too much you know if you if you do a calculation of probabilities it you know given everything she could have dreamed of spontaneously that the timing and the character it's too much it's just too much i i my skeptical self cannot just dismiss this one but anyway there are other things between you and you involving you and or your girlfriend yeah sometimes we have the same thoughts spontaneously untriggered by an external assessment i mean the reason the reason i was i ask is because i mean first of all it seems to me like your world view your view of consciousness makes kind of intuitive sense to you in a way that it obviously doesn't to other people right i mean you have an easier time you know clearly seeing the the this view of consciousness than some people and and i was gonna ask two questions one was do you think that fact is uh you know you mentioned earlier that at age nine or ten you had this epiphany like whoa i'm different i i'm my own son now and i think most people don't have that intuition and i was going to ask did that signify that there's something different about the way you view the world uh that also accounts for the fact that this view is intuitively uh clear to you are those two things related but i was also gonna yeah go ahead answer that one i don't think i'm special or different in in any sense i think we all share our core humanity i think i would even go as far as to say that most people had the experience i had when i was nine it's just that they don't remember and my set of interests happened to be such that i registered that i found that peculiar and and i started i remember it uh but other people would have that dismiss it the next day and never again remember it but i i don't think i'm special in any sense now i have a world view that can accommodate certain things that mainstream materialism cannot which does make my life easier i don't i don't go wide-eyed think oh my god something supernatural no i i can accommodate that as a sort of more or less ordinary part of nature just like this dream in a way yeah yeah this i i don't go like thinking oh my god something supernatural happened to my girlfriend i i would tend to to regard that as okay it's just part of nature there's nothing extraordinary about this does your worldview make sense to your girlfriend and the reason i i was i was gonna ask that was i was wondering like do you think there's a connection between the fact that you think you are more susceptible to these what paranormal or whatever you want to call them experience and the fact that your world view makes sense to you right is it possible that you're you that i mean do you think you're kind of in some sense more plugged into your being and your view you know your view is that you're more plugged into reality than the average person you think your view of consciousness is right and theirs is wrong so you do think that is that related to what you see as you're being more susceptible to these weird experiences i don't think so before i was with my girlfriend i never witnessed these experiences no notice that these are not my experiences they are her experiences even when we share a thought it's usually her she starts saying telling me something and i go oh my god i was thinking just about that so she's the receiver you're just a transmitter kind of i i am a very hard-headed person i i hear people talk about certain epiphanies and experiences and i don't have that my first experiences that were non-ordinary yeah they were induced by high-dose psychedelics that i had to come to that in my 30s to experience these things that other people were reporting i'm pretty hard-headed um but you hadn't just this world view this view of consciousness before you took the psychedelics yeah no no i took the psychedelics as a sort of part of my due diligence if i was if i were talking about consciousness i had to understand the possible states of consciousness i was in my mid-thirties when i took psychedelics but to be clear so you're saying you did already or did not already have the view of consciousness we've been discussing here you had it before the psychedelics yeah yeah i arrived at my view of consciousness consciousness and nature out of logical reasoning and empirical evidence i i didn't come at this through first-person insight which i'm not proud of i i i think i am particularly um how to say dumb uh or or i i don't have subtlety in terms of i don't have that that kind of mental subtlety um how does that show up where do you lack subtlety without appreciating art or something or what that's one although i'm i softened myself over the years maybe the psychedelics helped in that oh definitely definitely but in my mid-20s i did not have subtlety of perception subtlety of appreciation i did not have any experiences i couldn't account for the world worked as clockwork as far as i was concerned look my first job in life i was a scientist at cern in switzerland the big accelerator when i was 22 it was my dream job and i got that job two days after i graduated um so my sense of wonder didn't come from altered states of consciousness or you know anything non-ordinary any non-ordinary experience my sense of wonder came from science and and and that was enough for me and back in the day i thought one of the fashionable physical theories of the 90s super symmetry it was beginning in the 90s but it was fashionable just like m theory was fashionable in the 90s now it's all about loop quantum gravity and the standard model has survived and all that but supersymmetry was for me like the expression of highest beauty in nature and it turned out to have been wrong it's wrong we didn't find supersymmetry so you know i'm if i were the same kind of person i was back then i would be pretty depressed today but luckily i evolved i am less hard-headed now but i'm not the kind of person that has this kind of spontaneous stuff happening to to them you mean the kind your girlfriend has you're just using like yeah the um so uh two closing questions one can just be yes or no question it's kind of for my information it takes us back to the quantum physics so do you find david bohm's view of quantum physics appealing i don't know much about it at all except that what i do know sounded a little like some things you might you were saying but i don't know so you can just say yes or no if you want now this question cannot be answered with a yes or no because it depends on which part of david baum's work bohmian mechanics which were communicated in in two large papers in the early 1950s bohmian mechanics i think is entirely flawed and i think has been experimentally now categorically refuted in 2018. uh not to mention the fact that it's incoherent it contradicts other parts of physics so i i think he was wrong uh uh in that regard it's a theory he developed together with the de broglie and de broglie had already said in his lifetime that he didn't believe his own theory anymore baum is the one that continued with it and i think even baum acknowledged at some point that bohmian mechanics is going to go nowhere however his notion of the um how did they call it the the implicated order order the implicate order there i think he hits the nail in the head yeah okay i'll i'll do more research to figure to figure out what that is the closing question is just kind of uh um we've talked about this a little but what what difference it makes to like if if i had an epiphany and again i don't rule out your view i i don't think there is a satisfactory resolution of the consciousness problem that i'm aware of and uh one of my frustrations is how few people appreciate how weird it is uh you know uh the fact that it is like something to be anything and um the uh i guess i was going to um i was going to ask what uh what difference it makes in your in your life uh so if i had a conversion experience or something and suddenly i really at an intuitive level became convinced that you're right um and don't rule it out but uh how might my life change would i be happier more depressed would i be nicer to people what well first i hope you don't need some kind of transcendent experience to endorse ideas and i think you can do that through rational thinking and empirical considerations but if you were to buy into analytic idealism wholeheartedly what would happen to you i don't know i can only tell you what happened to me um then it's not all roses on the negative side i have now fear of death that i didn't have before when i was at cern and i was not thinking about philosophy and i was a materialist not because i thought it through but because everybody else was okay that must be right um why would i be afraid of death death is just the end of the thing that suffers so there will be no one there to suffer it's the end of all my problems it's the end of everything i find bad all my regrets all my fears all my pain all my suffering it's the end of it it's guaranteed to happen may take a long time but you're guaranteed to get out of this um that was very comforting and and and thinking about this later on i realized that psychologically that's one of the big payoffs of materialism i mean materialism in the mid 19th century did away with the greatest fear of humanity throughout human history and prehistory which was the fear of what you would experience after death in christian terms are you going to go to hell it's the greatest human anxiety throughout history and we sort of did away with it in the mid 19th century that was great well now i think that death is the end of my dissociative process it's not the end of my subjectivity because my subjectivity is the subjectivity of nature is what there is where is it going to go it's going to go nowhere because everything happens in it well it will dissolve won't it kind of dissolve into the universal pool of consciousness like becomes brahman and so on if you want to give it religious language yes but it's the reabsorption of the altar in a broader cognitive context yeah and the best guess we the best model we have of how that might feel the best model we have today is the psychedelic experience because as it turns out and we've known that for 10 years now psychedelics vastly reduce brain activity that that is their key effect they reduce brain activity you're tripping out of your head but your brain is half dead and since death is the total end of brain activity psychedelics allow us to infer you know what that might be like and some psychedelic trips ego dissolution they're very difficult to go through it's the loss of your sense of individual self it's the feeling that you are losing control of your mind it it can be very anxiety-inducing so first change for me my death anxiety has returned yeah but i don't i mean can i just have raised two objections i mean first of all of course a lot of people would say you know who are atheists would say death i i i would love to believe in heaven death death terrifies me because it'll be the end of all the good stuff as well as the bad stuff no more loved ones no more this no um there's uh there's that reaction but also i would think that isn't isn't dissolution into the pool of consciousness kind of the end of your experience per se which is roughly what a materialist expects it's the same end of your experience as waking up from a dream is the end of your dream avatar you have a little avatar in the dream the dream is a dissociative state remember this during the dream you identify with your avatar but you are dissociated from the parts of your mind that are creating the rest of the dream you don't think the rest of the dream is being done by you you think you are inhabiting it and not doing it that dissociative state comes to an end the moment you wake up and then you realize it was my dream i was doing the whole thing and your dream avatar dies he's toast he's gone the moment you wake up but you don't mourn the end of your dream avatar because you know that the subjectivity in him is the same as the subjectivity in you while you are awake right so what you were what you really are and have always been doesn't die what dies the state of consciousness in a particular narrative of self those die moreover you remember your dream potentially so nothing is lost so i don't think when we die it's the end of us it's the end of the narrative of a personal self it's the dissolution of the ego that i know from direct experience can be extraordinarily hard it's painful beyond pain isn't that temporary i mean it's temporary the death is temporary and then suddenly you're just the whole universe and i i you know how bad could that be yes yes but temporary as it is if it's pretty bad that you know you know be tortured for a day so it's a moment of death that terrifies you i don't know how long that will be i think the notion of time is is is is a life a determined thing uh you can have a psychedelic trip that lasts two minutes but it feels like a hundred thousand years and look as i was saying if you're going to be tortured for a day why would you worry about it it's just a day man you'll be okay afterwards but it's still a day of torture so i know i don't like that prospect it may not be like that you know no it may not be i mean some people report positive near-death experiences and so on and so we don't know okay so what's the upside that's the downside for you of your worldview the upside is the return of meaning because um under materialism you know life and pain go hand-in-hand we all have a lot of pain not only physical pain psychological suffering regrets anxieties depression all kinds of things and we we think that everything we learn our process of maturation the insights we gather through all the all that pain that all of that is for nothing because insights are in consciousness consciousness ends when you die therefore your insights are lost so all that pain was for nothing now that i don't have anymore because i know the contents of my consciousness survive just like the memories of my dream survive when i wake up and therefore the insights survive and therefore all the pain in my life that leads to insights is a means to contribute to nature in religious language people would say your life is a service to god even if you're suffering yes not because god is is enjoys watching you suffer the mind of nature didn't put you in this situation in a premeditated way i don't think the mind of nature is metacognitive it doesn't hi it doesn't have a higher level mental functions but because of your suffering you arrive at insight you arrive at you arrive at certain understandings about what is um that once you die become available to a broader cognitive context because your dissociative boundary dissolves so all of your of the contents of your cognition throughout life and are available to nature at large and that's a contribution to nature so life in that sense is like sacrificial like carl jung used to say life is sacrificial in this sense and even if you suffer the suffering has meaning something will change in nature forever because you suffered and that something will be a positive you're contributing an insight to the raw mind of nature that wasn't there before and that will never cease to be will never cease to exist something will change something small but something will change in the universe forever because you've been here and you suffered and and and that's that's a way to be present to life that western culture has forgotten since the enlightenment we did have it before we had religious metaphors to capture that your suffering was a service to god of course we misinterpreted that thinking that god was um a sadist that's not a point the point is that your suffering will lead to insights that god cannot have uh uh or the mind of nature cannot have unless it goes through this amazing dissociative experience that we call life um yeah i mean i would think that the materialists could uh give give they could give themselves the same consolation i mean i can i can say that i can say uh of course that that presupposes that my my i mean i am someone who actually writes about ideas that's part of what i do for a living i put them out there and if i assume that on balance there's more productive ones than damaging ones that i put out there i can console myself with that kind of consolation right i mean even though i'm a materialist or are you saying in your view it you are inherently uh we don't have to evaluate your ideas to say you're making a contribution or or what how is your consolation different from yes i'm saying that you're inherently making a contribution whether you know it or not whether you want it or not it does not matter you are doing it it's a fact of reality live with it but that to me is a good fact of reality look can materialists live with meaning of course we know in psychology uh there is this this phenomenon called fluid compensation if you lose a transcendent source of meaning you will fluidly compensate with that with a temporal source of meaning like you contribute contribute to the great edifice of science and your contribution to that edifice will survive you so there's still meaning in your life this is all valid fluid compensation is not invalid um but it is always conditional because if tomorrow a comet hits the earth and life ends and the planet ends and all human life ends and all of our records end then it will have been for nothing oh it was always for nothing if it ever comes to an end then it was always for nothing and under analytic idealism it cannot come to an end because the mind of nature is what is it's what there is beginnings and ends happen within it not to it okay so that returns and there are other implications robert i mean my my view of health now is different i think if the body is what our dissociative mentation looks like even the areas of our mentation that we cannot introspect into and are seemingly quote unconscious they're just not metacognitive they're not unconscious but we cannot access them directly the quality of those mental processes look like your health they look like your body your body is what those inner deep mental processes look like so talk therapy can have direct physical effects on your health how well you integrate your experiences in life how well you are present to the world how well you deal with your regrets and your anxieties that has a direct bearing on your physical well-being because your physical well-being is what those mental processes deeply ingrained look like um and that's an account for the placebo effect which we know is not only there but it's enormous and growing great great uh source of worry for drug companies that have to prove that drugs are better than placebo placebos are getting better so the threshold is getting higher for them um but we don't have a a an account for how placebo can happen well analytic idealism gives you an account of that your mental state is what is portrayed through your physicality your physicality is what your inner mental state looks like which doesn't mean that if you have a bad thought you're going to get cancer actually research shows that it is repressed anger anger that you don't know you have that correlates with higher incidence of cancer it's your total mental inner life that counts not your egoic in your life not the part of your inner life that you're explicitly aware of and can report to to others and to yourself even it's your so-called unconscious mind that counts um so yeah many things changed in my life meaning my understanding of health the way i relate to other people uh i relate to other people as part of me and my level of empathy has grown so much since i was in my twenties i had very little empathy in my twenties um today i despair of seeing how pigs are treated um they are products now life has been turned into products we see life as a product that goes through a manufacturing line their lives is their manufacturing process and that fills me with despair because i know that all the anxiety all the despair induced in those animals animals the memories of all that they are waiting for me when i die because when i die i am the whole i will beat them i'll have the memory of their dreams if you know what i mean and and and and i i'm filled with despair i i'm filled with despair with the prospect of war in ukraine and between russia and ukraine not only because i relate to lots a lot of these things bother me too i mean i believe pigs have sentience so i'm bothered by their suffering but now i don't believe i'm ever going to merge with it but uh there's that difference but um but if you will it becomes a very egoistic fear like you will suffer their suffering at least in memory yeah and the memory of suffering can be as bad as the suffering as we know from post-traumatic stress disorder yeah i will say on the you know as long as they're about animals i have two dogs one of them does not make much eye contact he just looks away while you pet him the other one is really intense about eye contact and and like you can stare into his eyes and you know that's very hard to do with a human being because as some anthropologist once said if two people maintain eye contact for 10 seconds it means they're either going to fight or make love you know it just doesn't happen with people that they just keep staring into each other's eyes and i will say the closest i ever come to having the sense that it's consciousness that's fundamental is when i'm staring into my dog's eyes it's like there's something going on here that's really that's really deep and there's a connection being made between us that's more fundamental than the physical stuff if that if that makes sense yeah but look life is constantly telling us that because you were always cooped up in consciousness there is nothing that has ever happened to you that was not in your consciousness everything that is not consciousness is a vague theoretical abstraction an unnecessary one and one that doesn't explain anything um so the whole of life is telling you that your whole life is a play in consciousness and off consciousness it has never been anything else it is so close to us it's so much under our noses that we don't see it anymore it's like fish not knowing what water is well i agree with that uh well okay well this has been fascinating i mean i'm not sure i want to work to uh to really uh accept your world view now that i know it would mean merging with pig suffering but it has upstairs as you noted uh so thank you yeah go ahead you're going to say something just to to reassure you on that um i think the mind of nature has many many many experiences unfathomably many that all that big suffering will be a small part of it very tiny maybe even in conception you should tell yourself yeah it sounds like that's a message for you that's what i tell myself in the mirror but when i witness that suffering when i think it's happening i still go into despair right but yeah i have to deal with it as one should uh well this has been this has been really interesting let me let me say again uh some books of yours are the idea of the world i think that's a collection of papers uh decoding schopenhauer's metaphysics that's your most recent one why materialism is is baloney the most recent one is science ideated okay science ideated okay even more recent than 2020. uh you're putting them out pretty fast congratulations on that where else can people is there do you have a twitter handle or anything you want to advertise or a website yeah twitter handler is at bernardo castro castro with a k and a p for peter at the end my website is bernardocastrop.com and from the website you have links to everything free papers free essays videos podcasts links to my youtube channel twitter handle facebook the whole thing you find everything from there okay and i on twitter and my robert writer but i gotta say i don't tweet about consciousness a lot so that may or may not be of interest to people but thank you so much bernardo it's been a lot of fun i hope i hope we'll talk again it's been a pleasure robert thanks for for having me thanks for the opportunity

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Keywords: politics, policy, elections, news, current events

Id: tdlCv8SORu4

Length: 129min 36sec (7776 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022