Dr Bernardo Kastrup: On Mind, Materialism, Religion, Carl Jung, Christ, and the Return to Wisdom

praise him praise him praise him in the morning praising me praising praise [Music] hi welcome to our christ today i'm joined by dr bernardo castro bernardo is executive director of essentia foundation his work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism really the notion that reality is essentially mental is a phd in philosophy focusing on areas like ontology philosophy of mind and another phd actually in computer engineering reconfigurable computing artificial intelligence and such things so as a scientist bernardo has worked for the european organization for nuclear research cern and the philips research laboratories where the customer effect of quantum field theory was discovered and formulated in detail in many academic papers and books his ideas have then been featured in the scientific american institute of arts and ideas the blog of the american philosophical association and big think amongst others so just to begin then bernardo um what first prompted your interest in the mind even the cosmos and some of those central concerns that we now see in your work i think i was born interested in in these things since i was a kid i asked myself these questions you know about identity existence and there was this phase of my life i was around 12 that i started realizing that i was me i was not the world that i saw around me and how weird that whole thing was that i wasn't the world and then in university it's sort of these questions went to the background my first education is computer science and then only years later i was still my 20s but i was working with ai and of course the question arises if you can build a machine that is intelligent what are you missing to make it also conscious and that's what got me to more formally address these questions and eventually come up with some answers that are satisfying at least to me um amazing and um can you tell me a bit about the kind of story and how it formed that you developed a greater love for the kind of traditional spiritual riches and um things that you've written about in books like more than allegory um i think uh religion and spiritual approaches to reality have gotten a very bad press since the european enlightenment uh that that is so because of essentially political reasons uh early science was under death threat from the church and they did burn bruno at the stake in the year 1600 so science had a healthy fear of ecclesiastical authorities back then um but that that momentum gathered against religion um stayed there even when it no longer made much sense it became a sort of an inertia in western society and it's a it's unfortunate because now it uh it makes us miss [Music] an incredibly rich and important part of our heritage um and i think that's a tragedy and um i wanna ask you a little bit about influences then bernardo are there any particular persons who spring to mind who've been especially inspirational or influential in your life carl jung has been very influential an inspiration for me since i was a teenager several years ago now already i was already a young adult one specific paper by david chalmers was very influential in me for me one in which he framed the so-called heart problem of consciousness very unambiguously and very succinctly he basically said there is nothing about physical parameters in terms of which we could deduce the qualities of experience at least in principle and that landed like a bomb when i was thinking about you know the relationship between ai and artificial consciousness when i read that i realized that that's the reason why all my efforts led nowhere i mean whatever i changed about structure and function in a computer i had no less or more reason to think that experience of the company accompanied the data processing that computer and dave's paper made it clear to me that these two domains the domain of the qualities of experience and the domain of the quantities that fully characterize physical parameters they are incommensurable and that's trying to unite them is internally contradictory it's incoherent and therefore we have to take several steps back regarding our assumptions about the nature of reality uh in order to figure out where did we take a wrong turn that has led us to an internal contradiction and that's what i tried to do after that excellent and i'll ask you a little bit more about young then if i may so you've written a wonderful book about young decoding young's metaphysics the archetypal semantics of an experiential universe so just first of all in what is it about him in particular that you consider most vital and maybe what are some of the key themes or ideas that you find most worthwhile well um he gave me a picture of how the mind behaves that for some reason even from my very young 14 year old self made all kinds of sense it resonated like something that is self evidently true and that you didn't know it was because nobody said that to you until somebody comes and says it and you go like of course that's absolutely true and some of the key ideas for me in jung's work were the idea of the archetypes the notion that minds tend to behave according to certain natural templates of behavior that the behavior of mind is not random or always entirely original it's not arbitrary it it follows you could call it instinctive patterns that are universal and that unites unite us all we all express those universal archetypes in different ways in our own our own peculiar fashion but the archetypes are universal and transpersonal and also the notion of a collective so-called unconscious it's not unconscious according to the modern understanding of the word it it should be called the collective unmeta conscious that would be more correctly or correctly stated but this idea that there is a very deep layer of our own minds which we share with everybody else perhaps all living beings that are very very deep level uh we are actually one we are not completely separate from one another it seems that we are separate because at this metacognitive level of our daily you know normal state of consciousness which is focused on immediate you know threats from the environment and how you have to react to environmental challenges where the attention is focused and where matter consciousness or metacognition is focused that's a very tiny tiny bit of mind mind goes much deeper than that and much wider than that so wide that if you go deep enough there is no distinction between you and me and um what then did you hope to add to the conversation with your book on top of the things that have been written about young since he was about then well clarity and and and hopefully correct some very clear misrepresentations of jung's ideas people still sell the idea and famous unions still sell this idea that the collective unconscious unconsciousness of jung means our genetic inheritance that's complete nonsense that contradicts a bunch of things jung said about the collective unconscious like the notion that even matter itself the inanimate universe that too is founded on the collective unconscious he said that explicitly more than once so this this talk that you know the collective unconscious is just our genetic inheritance is absolutely nonsense for anyone who just took the time to read what jung had to say about these things that was one motivation and the other one was well there were many but these are the two important ones the second one was my an effort i made to clarify that what jung meant by the unconscious is not what we would mean by something that lacks consciousness today today when we say consciousness philosophers usually mean phenomenal consciousness raw experience if there is something it is like to be you then you are conscious you don't need to have higher level mental functions to be conscious you don't need to be self-aware self-reflective meta metacognitive none of that is needed so long as you have raw experience you are conscious and when jung talked about the unconscious what he meant to negate was not phenomenal consciousness he meant to negate higher level mental functions associated with consciousness like self-awareness or or explicit cognitive associations between different mental contents the ability to not only experience but to be able to report on your experiences to your therapist because there are many things we experience but we don't know that we experience them because we lack this meta consciousness the ability to not only experience something but to know that we are experiencing that thing that's matter consciousness and that's what that's what the unconscious does not have uh but the unconscious is experiential in nature just like consciousness and jung was clear in that regard if you actually read what he had to say when when he he when he elaborated on what he meant as opposed to sticking to the meaning of a word that was different back in the late 19th century than it is today um excellent thank you bernardo and um so i'd love to look some more at your specific networks and things you've touched upon over the years so i'll focus my questions mainly around why materialism is baloney how true skeptics know there's no death and father monsters to life the universe and everything and then um sort of delve into the themes that you've built upon over the years since that book so you began that book by leonard uh can it action what has become the against what's become the dominant worldview which is the naming materialism can you describe what that means in this kind of double senses you seem to make a reasonable link i think between the philosophy of materialism and then the more egotistical consumers materialism that many of us are familiar okay so one is metaphysical materialism it's a metaphysical position it states that what the world the universe is really made of is of a substance that is outside in independent augmentation of experience and we colloquially call that substance matter or physicality or physical entities so that's that's metaphysical materialism that what really exists is not our minds our minds are a byproduct a side effect an epiphenomenon of certain physical arrangements in the form of metabolizing brains what really exists is something that is not mental and that's matter so that's metaphysical uh materialism and then there is of course ethical materialism which is the notion that what is worth in life is the accumulation of material stuff now strictly speaking these are completely different and independent positions you can be a metaphysical materialist without being an ethical materialist and the other way around but in practice of course if your metaphysical outlook on life is that the only thing that really exists is this matter stuff that is outside mind and mind is something that comes and goes and passes and all of your insights everything you learned at great cost from all the suffering you went through in your life all of that will be lost the moment you die because that's mental stuff and mental stuff disappears the moment matter disorganizes and no longer creates that mental stuff so if you are an adherent to metaphysical materialism then of course you know the only conceivable purpose for life is to accumulate material things because these are the only things that really exist to accumulate love and insight and learning and maturity and compassion you're going to lose all of that guaranteed the moment you die if that's what you believe then of course the only game in town is to accumulate material things moreover you're not going to be around in 100 years so who cares if you just you know exploit the planet to the point that future generations will not be able to have a decent life if they exist at all who cares you're not going to be around your mind is will be gone you might as well plunder it while you can excellent thanks bernardo and the only other sort of well one of the other main alternatives that i suppose from within their perspective that they might suggest would be to um immortalize themselves through say institutions or something which seems to be what ernest becker critics and his idea of the kind of denial of death that they're so afraid today that then attach themselves to these institutions and what would you have anything to say to that kind of approach well-known psychological phenomenon look throughout human history 99 percent of it we derived meaning from transcendence we derived meaning from the notion that you know before we we were born and after we die there is something that is not immediately apprehensible in this mode of consciousness that we call life and and that transcendent space is where meaning is rooted whatever we do here has has ultimate purpose or significance to bring something back to transcendent space or something like this so that has been the notion throughout the vast majority of human history but um after the european enlightenment and especially in the mid 19th century mid to late 19th century when nietzsche declared the death of god which was not something he wanted but he observed that that's where culture was going and of course he was right we've lost this notion of meaning from transcendence because we've killed god we no longer believe in transcendence so where does meaning come from we are meaning seeking creatures we cannot have life without a source of meaning and psychology has has discovered and documented very well this phenomenon called fluid compensation which is when you lose one source of meaning your psychology will automatically compensate for it uh by investing something else with meaning finding another source of meaning and many of these sources are known one you mentioned if you participate in something bigger than you which will survive your existence will be here after you are no longer around then you derive meaning from that like participating in the cosmological project of western science uh um what you contribute to that will survive you that's one source of meaning compensation or fluid compensation there are others um closure is a big one even if this whole thing is a meaningless uh you know cruel meaningless game at least if we understand it and understand that it is so we get one up on it we derive meaning from closure at the end we're gonna die and it will be for nothing anyway that's what we think but at least we understood it and that gives us a sense of you know fluidly compensated meaning um yeah having a a very highly positive opinion about oneself self-affirmation is another source of meaning that we sort of manufacture when psychologically when we lose the only true source of meaning of course which is transcendence but when we lost that when the intellectual elites in the west lost that they had to fluid compensate and we see that happening still today fluid compensation has been the psychological drive be behind the new neo80s movement in at the turn of the century when we had people who derived meaning from putting themselves up as the tough people who acknowledge the tough facts of reality and putting everybody else down like all the religious people they're idiots they know they are not worth it they are they are clowns uh and you see that very much you know richard dawkins is a prime example of that um that's meaning compensation in action it's someone who believes that well this is all for nothing anyway but at least i am the one tough enough to face the bleak facts and those other gullible uh wish fulfilling people they are entertaining their little fairy tales uh to feel better about life it's the psychology you know that's that's how it works yeah and it seems to be that um dr bill kavanaugh has an interest in sort of thesis that this skills as it were so sadly and that we organize our societies around what he calls the kind of migration of the holy whereby as you say from the religious say to to now the holy holy is migrated or transcendence kind of regretted to the market into the state and we tend to imbue those with these transcendent kind of um this transcendence significance even though we kind of make it imminent as well as trustees at the same time um so i want to ask i want to move on next fma bernardo to the relationship between the mind and the body which i think you make really clear and many of us i think take for granted but i think as you show a we've got a kind of upside down in many ways so i just want to ask can you describe perhaps that your idealist understanding and how that contrasts with the dominant materialist sort of paradigm and how in some ways that actually subverts the kind of common idea that it's as if materialism is actually somewhat more earthy and it reality is just there whereas i think you show that it's a decidedly more complex picture than that it's precisely the opposite materialism is really far out okay under materialism the mind is generated by the brain if the brain loses its structural or dynamical integrity then the mind disappears because the mind is generated by the brain just like light is generated by a light bulb if the light bulb burns there is no light um and um what really is out there is not something that you can even visualize it's something that is exhaustively describable through quantities numbers like kilograms uh hurts and all the other physical quantities spin charge momentum geometrical relationships angles distances and so on and so forth but you can't visualize that because it has no qualities it doesn't have a color it doesn't have a flavor doesn't have texture it's purely abstract it's something describable through a mathematical equation but you cannot visualize it beyond that and qualities are supposed then to be generated by our brain inside our skull so the world of qualities of colors of melodies of flavors and smells that you experience around you is actually according to materialism inside your head the inner surface of your skull is beyond the stars you actually see in the night sky because the stars you see are qualitative things they are shiny they are white against a black or dark blue background and and all those qualities under materialism are not up there they are inside your skull so your skull the inner surface of your skull is above the moon you see at night there is a moon outside your skull according to materialism but it's not your experience of the moon there is an abstract object beyond your skull that you cannot be acquainted with directly you cannot even visualize it because visualization immediately entails qualities and that object which is really out there has no qualities it's just geometrical relationships you know mathematical equations floating in the vacuum of space so the moon you actually see is below the inner surface of your skull the world is in your head the world you experience is in your head the supposedly real world that is out there is not something you can experience directly that's materialism um and of course there are there are at least five reasons why this is wrong each one of them sufficient to completely debunk materialism um idealism on the other hand is the notion that it's not your mind that is inside your head it's your head that is in your mind it's the other way around or to speak religious language the soul is not in the body it's the body that is in the soul um under idealism analytic idealism which is what i put forward the body including the brain the living brain the metabolizing body is what a certain configuration of consciousness looks like and that's why brain activity correlates with experience it's because brain activity is what experience looks like when observed from the outside or technically from across a dissociative boundary so your mind is not in your body your body is a representation of your mind a cognitive representation of the state of your mind therefore your mind is not inside your body the moon you see is not inside your body the moon you see is in your mind but so is your body your body and the moon they are both in your mind your head is inside your mind because your head is a cognitive qualitative representation of your own mental state and it seems like it's a very difficult idea to wrap your head around but it's incredibly sensible and intuitive once you really get it excellent i agree thank you bernardo and you also describe the hard problem of consciousness which people may know at a popular level but not really know what it's about can you tell us about that and how you describe it in the book and how that is why that's significant well metaphysical materialism states categorically that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain in other words it is brain activity that somehow generates or even is the mind there are materialists out there who go as far as to say that consciousness doesn't exist it's just brain activity i mean our consciousness is an illusion which is it's probably this stupidest thought ever conceived by the human mind and the whole history of thought because of course an illusion is an experiencing consciousness so you cannot say that consciousness doesn't exist because it's an illusion because if there is an illusion then of course consciousness must exist in order for there to be an illusion so if that's the postulate that the mind is somehow generated by the brain then for this idea to hold any water someone at some point will have to articulate how is it at least in principle that if electrochemical activity in our synapses which is something describable through physical parameters generates the feeling of falling in love or being disappointed or smelling coffee or biting into an apple there is and that's the heart problem as it turns out there is nothing about the physical parameters that can describe brain activity in terms of which we could deduce in some more or less natural and logical way the qualities of experience like if you have this pattern of brain activity then we can deduce that you should be feeling hunger feeling hungry um but there isn't such a link the link is merely empirical in the sense that we measure your brain activity when you are hungry and we know the correlation between the two but there is no in principle natural way to deduce one from the other other than to just measure and see what the correlation is and notice that this is not the case for literally everything else in science when we discovered the higgs boson at cern 10 years ago we had a complete elaboration of how and why the higgs boson and its associated higgs field creates mass makes things have mass and not fly at the speed of light all the time we had a chain of deduction that allowed us to very naturally come from here is the higgs boson to it's difficult to get a train to move and and that chain of deduction existed before we even measured the higgs boson before we even found a higgs boson never measured that he exposed them directly but before we even found the footprints of the higgs boson there was a natural chain of deduction you cannot have this natural chain of deduction from brain activity to mental states qualitative states these two domains are completely incommensurable uh the the the the link between the two is arbitrary you have to measure them to see what the link is there is no way to deduce that uh or to logically infer one from the other and the reason is that we mistake them the map for the territory um these numbers that characterize physical entities they are descriptions of the world of qualities we see around us and at some point and that's a very weird thing in the history of western thought at some point we decided that the description of the world was the world and that these qualities we see around us somehow were a product of the description it's like you look at the world and you draw a map of it the map is a description of the world and then weirdly you say the map is the actual world and somehow the map generates the world and then we try to pull the world out of the map and we fail and then we call it a problem the heart problem of consciousness and we promise ourselves that in version 2 or 3 or 100 of the map we will be able to pull the territory out of the map it's a matter of making a better map and then you will be able to pull the territory out of it and of course this is ludicrously stupid um and and unfortunately it is this stupidity at the foundation of western metaphysical thoughts to today thank you for bernardo and i think they you ex you kind of communicated a gift that they think you have to explain these difficult concepts using wonderful metaphors and analogies and that comes across in your written work too so you use one of the world pool which i found very helpful and in that early book can you tell us a bit about that and again how that shows how our individual minds relate to the unconscious and how that suggests that we are actually related as you describe yeah okay so let me start with with the actual problem that motivated that there are many mainly three metaphysical alternatives today that are discussed one is materialism and that is uh particular organizations of matter somehow generate mind or experience or consciousness the other is penn psychism matter doesn't generate consciousness matter really exists it has standalone existence and consciousness is one of its properties like matter has mass has charge electric charge has angular momentum or spin oh and it has experiential states or consciousness and the problem with that one is how do you get from the literal consciousnesses of all the subatomic particles that constitute your brain to your unitary conscious inner life you don't have gazillions of little conscious in their lives each one corresponding to an elementary particle in your brain you are you so the problem of going from all these little separate subjectivities to your unitary in your life is called the combination problem and it is as hard as the hard problem of consciousness in other words it's incoherent it's not a problem it's an internal contradiction of a wrong line of thinking you cannot articulate coherently any way in which fundamentally separate fields of experience could could combine to form a unitary higher level field of experience it's incoherent to even try to do that which leaves us with with the third alternative which is instead of matter generating consciousness or the consciousnesses of little bits of matter combining to form higher level consciousnesses we start with the whole we say the universe is one consciousness that's the way we have to avoid the problem of the other two approaches which are incoherent and they are not problems they are insoluble um so to avoid that we say let's start from the whole let's start from a holistic approach the universe is one mind and matter is what the mental activity of that one mind looks like from a certain perspective a dissociative perspective that's the technical part of it but then if that's your starting point you have to account for how come i can't read your thoughts how come i don't know what's happening in china or in the galaxy of andromeda right now because if it's all one universal mind i should know all these things now i'm part of that mind and it's one mind therefore i should know everything that's going on in that one mind but i don't so what's happening that is what is called the decomposition problem um how do you account for separate minds if you start from one universal mind and the way we can account for that technically is this is dissociation but the metaphor is the metaphor of we're opposing a river if there is a whirlpool in a river you can point at it and you can say there that's a whirlpool you can trace the boundaries of the whirlpool you know exactly where the whirlpool ends which part of the river is no longer part of the whirlpool but notice that although you can identify it as an individual entity with clearly demarcated boundaries there is nothing to the rope pool but the river you can't go and lift the whirlpool out of the river the whirlpool is just the river it's a pattern of behavior a pattern of movement of the river there is nothing to it but the river other metaphors are there is nothing to a guitar string that plays a note other than the guitar string itself there's nothing to a dance a choreography but the dancer when the dancer moves you get the dance but there's nothing to the dance but the dancer in the same way there is nothing to the whirlpool but the river the whirlpool is a dance of the river but it's a dance that is such that you can demarcate a subset of the river and you say here is the whirlpool and here the whirlpool ends it's an individual within that hole and that's a metaphor for our minds just as the whirlpool is a pattern an identifiable pattern of localization of water in the river water that instead of flowing through keeps on turning around a certain point our mental inner lives are a pattern of localization of the universal stream of mind and that pattern of localization that we call our lives our conscious in their lives has an appearance you can delineate its boundaries it's the boundaries of the body and you can say here the body ends just like you can say here the whirlpool ends but we cannot be lifted out of the universal mind in exactly the same sense that you cannot lift the whirlpool out of the river our minds are just a universal mind doing a dance of localization that seems to become individuated just like a whirlpool seems to be individuated it's a thing you can point at it and say there there's the whirlpool here are the boundaries of the whirlpool you can point at each we can point at each other and say there he is or you can point at your point at yourself and say here i am these are the boundaries of my mind if i squeeze my skin here i feel it it's part of me if i squeeze my my cat's a mattress here i can feel it so that's not my mind and the same thing for the whirlpool you can you can you can tell where it ends and yet there is nothing to it but the river in the same way that there is nothing to our seemingly individuated conscious in their lives but universal consciousness dancing this dance of localization that one day comes to an end and um i want to take it in a slightly different direction next if i may if you're comfortable with this paragraph so i just want to ask you so from an orthodox christian perspective i find much in your work that i agree with and a lot more helpful and closer to our hearts than minds than um the kind of dominant materialism and how that's sort of manifested and you used kind of more traditional terms at times drawn from salat and dharma referring to brahman and maya and things like that i'm just wondering a what you described describe as mind we might understand as god from within a theistic sort of context a are there any can a theistic peninstic or other terms like that that you think are closest to what you're describing or do you not like to bracket in those terms and maybe would that just close people after your ideas or what would be the motivation there well it's not really closing people off it's just that it's a matter of being unambiguous um there probably are seven and a half billion definitions of god out there so if i use the word i i don't know what people will be understanding me to be saying and it's probably not what i'm trying to say so i try to avoid that so i try to use more you know slightly more precise terms um but i don't have anything against against the obvious association between what i'm calling universal consciousness and and the image of a divinity that you go from a to b in a very natural way here um and it's very it's very self-evident um and if you go into scripture there are hints all over the place um [Music] the the when when the parakeet the holy spirit descended to every man woman and child with a pure heart that's in a sense telling us that we are all whirlpools of the same river because the holy spirit is god and is jesus um or when john says this or talks about jesus and god has the logos logos is a greek word that we translated as word but it also means thought mental processes so to call jesus and therefore god the logos you are saying that god is a mental entity which is in a sense exactly what analytic idealism puts forward there is more i mean we can get into the details but the first book of the bible is an amazingly specific and accurate description of the birth of metacognition in the human mind when we not only experienced nakedness but we then knew that we were naked that's metacognition and you get that when you take a bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge i mean how could it be more clear so but anyway i'll leave it at that no i'm into that so thank you bernardo and i also want to ask you so throughout your work you sort of you note the close relationship between the brain and the mind as you're hitting that but you're quite vigilant to avoid collapsing one into the other and making the kind of crude causal inference that many people make that it just comes from the brain can you describe that a bit more and why that is so important we tend to think in dualistic terms and materialists especially they really have a dualist way of thinking that's what i've noticed over the years so when i say that it's all mind i usually get the following attempt at a rebuttal people say well if i stick your arm with a needle you feel pain if you drink a glass of wine something changes in your mind so obviously the causal chain goes from material processes to mental processes ergo mental processes are caused by material processes that's an entirely dualistic way of thinking because if you heard what i'm saying what i'm seeing is that everything is actually mental and what we call matter are what certain mental processes look like from a given perspective so there is no needle the needle is what the transpersonal mental process out there looks like when you observe it so that the needle causes pain only means that there is one mental process outside of you that is impinging on your internal mental processes and that different mental processes impinge causally on one another is trivial your thoughts impinge on your emotions your emotions impinge on your thoughts you can feel very bad emotions because you had certain thoughts and the other way around you think happy thoughts you feel better so mental processes causally affect one another all the time it's trivial it's its nature is given we know that that happens so when a needle sticks you in the arm that's a transpersonal mental process having a causal effect on your personal mental processes when you drink a glass of wine that glass of wine is what a transpersonal mental process looks like and once you ingest it you're bringing the causal influence of that mental process into your own whirlpool and that will have an effect on the dynamic inner dynamics of the whirlpool so that's what you have to remember that for an idealist matter does not have standalone existence matter is an image an appearance it's what underlying mental processes look like and therefore if a surgeon takes a scalpel to your head to your brain something very dramatic will happen inside you because that scalpel is what a certain mental process looks like and if you take it into your whirlpool it may even disrupt the whirlpool so much uh that it will dissolve the whirlpool you think of it as a big ripple coming down the river and then it impinges on a whirlpool and dissolves the whirlpool yeah and then that can happen sure and uh you also if i recall correctly a talk about how the brain works as a knot of the mind can you just describe that a little bit how that sort of plays out these are different metaphors for the same thing and and i understand you that you're not taking me down the road of saying these same things in technical unambiguous precise terms um because it's probably not going to be accessible for a whole bunch of people so i understand that so the not metaphor is an alternative to the whirlpool metaphor um think of the original mental processes in this universal mind the mind that underlies our nature this instinctive mind um think of them as threads just like our thoughts tend to be threats you have one thought leads to another that leads to a memory which leads to another thought it's a thread of cognitive associations and we think along these threads so you can picture this universal mind's mental activity as this threads now imagine that instead of linear threads that these threads start turning in upon themselves it's like you have a thought that leads to a memory that leads to an emotion which leads you back to the original thought which leads to the memory and leads to the emotion and leads you back to the original thought we all experience this we all loop these are thought loops usually they are detrimental they are associated with addiction with obsessive-compulsive disorder uh with even less pathological things when we are brooding we fall into these thought loops so we all have experience of what these these loops of you know of chains of associations feel like now if you think of all of those threads of the universal mind forming these loops and getting tied together and folding in upon themselves you get a very complex guardian knot of mental associations that instead of flowing into you know the vast universe augmentation out there um becomes self-focused because all of those threads sort of fold in upon themselves forming this ever tighter and tighter knot that's the human mind that's that's the mind of of a living animal or a living entity that seems to be separate from the rest of what's going on in mind because it has become so self-focused because of all this know this knots of cognitive associations that form we are not born quite like that there is a certain nutness to our being born already but usually it takes exposure to the culture for a few years for that not to really form you know it doesn't form before you're seven years old um before that age you are the world now you're not an observant an observer of the world and the world is separate from you no you are the world because it's entirely natural for us to think like that prior to culture let me give you an example when we have different thoughts in the course of a day we don't think of those thoughts as part of the world they are ours our thoughts we go from a to b to c to d to d to e to f all different thoughts we sort of traverse an avenue of thoughts but we consider those ours they're not out there they are my thoughts but if i'm walking down a street then i see the houses and the trees pass by those houses and those trees are also my mental experiences i am having the experience of walking down the street and these houses and trees and cars pass by but i don't see them as mine i don't see them as me i see them as out there so why the distinction you could also say well i traverse my thoughts just as i traverse the street or alternatively if the thoughts are part of me so is the street but we make this distinction in one case it's us in the other case it's not a child doesn't do that for the child going down the street is them just like going down the avenue of a certain thought process it's all mental activity different types but it's all mental activity so if it's them in one case it's them in the other case too it takes culture to make that split certain experiences are not yours other ones are and the ones that are yours we tend to put down um if a child wakes up in the middle of the night scared because the child hasn't had a dream we will say that incredibly damaging but sweet sounding thing we say don't worry sweetheart it was just a dream it's like your inner life doesn't count the only thing that counts is what culture tells you is out there and it's not you that's the only thing that that matters your dreams don't matter it's a very short step to your emotions don't matter your your your suffering doesn't matter and at the end you're going to die anyway and all of your insights are going to be lost anyway so who cares right i'm not sure you know so actually i don't want to burden you or a listeners with metaphor after metaphor but i think they're fantastic and most clarifying so i just want to ask you a little bit about uh mutually facing merge as i think you describe and some of the empirical support for the metaphors that you describe in the book so that's the part about matter consciousness and let me try i'll repeat the distinction between consciousness and matter consciousness pure consciousness means that you have experience meta consciousness means that in addition to having experience you know that you have experience this knowing that you have experience is an internal re-representation of mental content so in addition to the pain when you report to someone i am in pain you re-represented that pain because now not only do you experience having the pain now you experience knowing that you have the pain and therefore you can report it to your doctor to the nurse to your partner whoever and this is very important because meta consciousness is recursive you can apply it to itself again and again so not only do you know that you're experiencing something you know that you know that you're experiencing something and you know that you know that you know that you're experiencing something and you can go like this forever we call this attention not flow flow is a different kind of attention flow is when you lose that all together and you sort of flow with the experience but um laborious attention like when the teacher tells the kid at school pay attention that's what you do you you know that you know that you know that you are reading that thing and sometimes all of these degrees of recursion this knowing that you know that you know can distract you from the actual thing you lose sight of the thing pupils at school know that all the time try to pay attention explicitly and you will realize that you no longer know what you're reading because you're so busy with the process of paying attention that that you lose sight of the origin of the thing this recursive process of re-representation or recursive metacognition is like two mirrors facing each other they reflect each other's image ad infinitum and we call the effect the infinite and the infinity mirror i think it's what's called it's like a camera filming its own images on a monitor it goes down forever and that has the effect of focusing consciousness so much um to such a degree that it obfuscates everything else that is not part of that recursive process it's the pupil at school if you focus so much on trying to pay attention you you no longer know what's happening around you you no longer know even the thing that you're trying to pay attention to everything becomes obfuscated by this this re-representation this recursive re-representation process like two mirrors facing each other and unfortunately that's what happens to all of us all the time we are experiencing a whole bunch of things that we don't know that we are experiencing because we are so focused on a subset of it we put that subset of it under the microscope of these recursive re-representations and that obfuscates everything else we lose sight of nuance of subtlety we no longer recognize the assumptions that we are automatically making and maybe completely wrong it's like not seeing the stars at noon if you are a photographer a sky photographer you will know this from experience the stars are all visible at noon actually the planets as well if you had a good camera with enough zoom capability you can zoom into saturn in a sunny day at noon and you see it clearly it is right there against a light blue background you can see the moons of jupiter at noon if you had a good camera therefore the photons from jupiter's moons and saturn they're all coming through they're not being lost they're not being filtered out by the atmosphere they are coming through and they are hitting your retina if you just look at the right place but you will not be able to tell yourself i'm seeing saturn because your vision is obfuscated by the glare of the atmosphere obfuscation renders you practically or effectively blind to the entire universe around you at noon and so that's a metaphor the exact same thing is happening to you right now when it comes to your own mental universe there is a bottomless mental universe in you um but you are dissociated from a lot of it and the rest of it you can't see just for the same reason that you can't see the sky is at noon your metacognition you're paying attention to the things that the narrative in your mind tells you are the things that matter you're paying attention uh straining to pay attention to the things that matter creates a mental glare that obfuscates all the subtlety all the nuance that's going on in that immense inner mental environment that that is you excellent thank you bernardo and i think that's incredibly helpful for people even to understand mystics and where mystics are coming from whereas i think with the kind of strict crude dualism we have nowadays we think that that's just a kind of form of romanticism so again it's putting down their emotions their experiences so it's most helpful thanks for that bernardo and um i wanna ask you make another another wonderful nuance point about truth a if i recall right and move away from a cruder more propositional understanding of truth that we've inherited and um how we might actually discern this collective reality alongside or and intertwine with our personal realities can we talk a bit about truth as you understand it and how that sort of lays itself out then yeah we have in the west today it's changing but it's still there still mainstream um a particular theory of truth and that's the correspondence theory of truth and it goes as as follows any statement you make a mental statement is true or isn't true depending on whether there is something outside mind that corresponds to that statement so if you say that volcano is erupting that's a mental statement it's an assertion that your mind makes that assertion will either be true or not depending on whether that volcano outside of mind is erupting or not that's the correspondence theory of truth a mental content is either true or false depending on whether it corresponds or not to a non-mental content that's an incredibly naive view of things because there are no such things as non-mental content and if they did exist things would be effectively as if they didn't because we cannot access anything that is not mental the non-mental quality of that volcano is an abstraction of a materialist metaphysic metaphysics because the volcano we see the volcano we hear the volcano whose burns we feel is a mental volcano it looks like something it feels like something so it's not outside mind so what we have to do is to adopt a less naive theory of truth which is based on some form of mental consensus a statement of your personal mind is true or not true depending on the level of consensus around that statement so if 10 people are next to you when you say that volcano is erupting if those 10 people tell you yes we too are experiencing now an erupting volcano then your assertion is true if not then your experience is still true you may be hallucinating you may be daydreaming you may be a hallucinating maybe schizophrenic and that volcano's eruption is true to you in so far as it is being experienced by you so it is true as an experience an experience is not nothing no there is a difference between having the hallucination and not having the hallucination the hallucination is not nothing it exists as such as a mental content but of course if we would say that everything is true if it is experienced by one person then the next person to declare himself the second come of the messiah we will have to follow that person because it's true for him or her right and of course that's not sustainable so what we have to do is understand that truth or falsity is a consensus determination and yes that makes things tricky because there are such things as collective delusions induced by a certain narrative of what's going on and some of our cherished truths may indeed be of that kind they may not correspond to truly transpersonal mental processes in nature out there they may be cultural artifacts psychological artifacts so this less naive theory of truth calls for a level of caution regards regarding what we consider true that isn't uh the case for the very naive correspondence theory of truth excellent thank you bernardo i want to ask you a little bit about um you make the nuance point again i think that there are indeed um clear limits between metaphors and analogies in reality and they encourage us not to get over kenneth um zealous with our use of metaphors and analyses and so again make them them the map instead of reality can you describe that a bit and why that's important the notion of a literal explanation or a literal description is fairly recent it's a western thing um before that all humans thought analogically they thought through analogy so analogy is when you say time is a river or a metaphor so when you say times a river you don't mean that time is literally a river if you had said time is a river two thousand years ago nobody would have this weird thought that you're saying that time actually is a river made of water flowing that's not the point the point is there is something about time that is the same about the river and you don't see what that is that's analogical thinking you do not need to say what the commonality is you let it you leave it to the intuition of the other person if you can see it the other person probably can see it too so the metaphor points at something without specifying what it is time is a river what do you mean by that well if i have to say it literally i would be able to say it both flow when i say time is a river what i'm saying is time flows just as the river flows in this particular case i happen to have the concept that specifies the commonality flow but our conceptual dictionary is limited language is limited conceptual reasoning is limited the intellect is 30 000 years old it was born yesterday it's a baby um humans exist in anatomically modern form for about 200 000 years so even within the human timeline the intellect is a child um in our conceptual dictionary is extraordinarily limited because language evoked for us to tell the others where the tiger is hiding tell the others where the fruit lies that the tree lies that have the good produces the the good fruit um language was created for but now operational purposes it was never meant to describe the deepest underlying truths of nature and reality the underlying truths of being there is no we don't have the concept for that why should we we've been walking around this rock for 30 000 years with as intellectually thinking symbolically thinking creatures um and that is the important point for most of the things that matter all i can do is to say time's a river because i don't have the concept that applies i don't have flow so i can't say literally that time flows all i can say is appeal to an analogy such that the other person can recognize what i mean without there having to be a concept part of a shared dictionary that can literally point at it and and and that's the tragedy because in our western culture in its immense naivete and ability inability to be self-critical we think today that everything that exists and matters can be described literally we think that everything of any salience of any significance can be captured within the set of concepts in our dictionary this is so abysmally naive that it hurts of course we don't have yet the concept the shared conceptual dictionary to specify all the things that are salient all the things that matter to life literally we don't have all we can do is to say times are ever because we don't have the concept we don't have the flow and guess what that's exactly what religious mythology does because we don't have the conceptual dictionary to refer literally to the ground of being to to what really really really at root level is going on we have to say that analogically metaphorically and when the jews wrote the old testament the jews in exile in babylon wrote the old testament two and a half thousand years ago it would never have occurred to them that when they said time is a river that anybody would have the thought that it's an actual river of water flowing and of course not nobody nobody thought like that therefore nobody would write like that whenever when they said time to river river they counted on your intuition to understand that what is being hinted at it's something we don't have the words for excellent exporter i know a one retort perhaps to that might be from what rupert chandra calls the science of the gaps whereby people will say oh well we haven't had the kind of a language to describe this phenomena in the past but one day science will answer all the questions but it sort of assumes built into that kind of philosophy that all questions are scientific in that mode of questioning and would you like to speak to that in some of the yeah also incredibly naive that this kind of idea is rooted in a profound lack of understanding of what the scientific method is and entails science is the study of nature's behavior not of what nature is science can say very very little and what it can say it can only say by implication it cannot say directly science can say very little about what nature is because the methods of science do not give us direct insight into being they only give us direct insight into behavior to be more specific the scientific method is based on experimentation you set up an experiment you control the conditions of the experiment and then you record the result what is happening there well what is happening is that when you set up the experience you're posing a question to nature and nature answers that to you in the form of the experimental result by behaving in a certain way the answer to an experiment is always a behavior of nature in other words it's something nature does in response to your experimental conditions so i used to work at cern in switzerland so when we collide protons at a very high number of terra electron votes with each other we are posing a question to nature and what how do you get the answer well we get the answer because in response to that collision of protons that we force nature behaves in a certain way in response to the collision so nature behaves by producing a whole number of subatomic particles that we detect with our calorimeters and our trackers and all that and reconstruct all that and we say oh there was a higgs boson there but we do that because nature has done something that we then measured in other words what we measure is what nature does its nature's behavior now what is a scientific theory a scientific theory is a model to predict nature's behavior that's all there is to it and as a tool to make that prediction we play a little game we pretend that nature is made in this or that way and if by pretending that our predictive model gives the right answers makes the right predictions then we can continue pretending that that's what nature is but it's a game of pretend let me give you concrete examples when nielsen said that there is gravity there is this invisible force that acts instantaneously at the distance between bodies pulling them to one another that's a pretend we pretend that there is this invisible force now at the time this was absurd it took the french 50 years to stop laughing of mutants invisible forces acting spontaneously what have you smoked are you on drugs but of course after those 50 years science embraced that there is gravity and that went along into einstein and then einstein came around and said nonsense of course there isn't such an invisible force acting at the distance what is really going on is that the fabric of space-time is bending and twisting well too bad it's invisible too so so now that's what nature is well until carlo rovelli came along and the loop quantum gravity people and they're saying no no no no no it's not the fabric of space-time malarkey that's nonsense time it doesn't even exist fundamentally it's created by quantum level uh the processes at the micro microscopic scale so you see these are what we call convenient fictions we pretend that there is such an invisible force we pretend that there is a malleable fabric of space-time we pretend that there is the higgs boson we never measured one what we measure is what the higgs boson decays into and even those are not really particles they are bumps on histograms so all of these things that science may say the world is made that way these are convenient fictions and their only purpose is to predict the behavior of nature in other words nature behaves as if there were an invisible force nature behaves as if there were a little particle called the heat explosion and that's all there is to it and that's all we need that's all we need we need to find the convenient fictions that are such that is as if those fictions were true nature behaves in a way that that is as if those fictions were true that's all there is to science and if the predictions are correct your theory is good if your predictions are not correct theory is bad but even in the good theories there are these convenient fictions and they are just that they are just convenient fictions we cannot forget that that's what these things are i'll give you another example sorry i'm talking too much but this is rich territory um you may be a seven-year-old kid and be world champion in a computer game now i am an old fashioned guy and i am from the atari 2600 generation and there was this game called hero for the atari 2600 in which you are a guy with a little helicopter backpack and you have a laser gun and you go down a dark cave shooting at things and then if you touch a wall that is glowing then you die and if you touch a spider you die and if you kill the bat and then you score point so a seven year year old kid can be world champion playing that game does that mean and in other words the kid can predict exactly what will happen in the game and react accordingly the kid will know where to go which wall to touch or not to touch what to kill and what not to kill where to be where not to be the kid's convenient fiction is that there is a little man with a helicopter backpack going down a dark cave inside the television because everything happens as if that were true and you can win the bloody game you can predict what the game would do and win the bloody game by adopting this convenient fiction that there is an actual little man with a natural helicopter little backpack and a laser gun going down an arcade inside your television so everything works as if that were true that's science if you have a convenient fiction that you can apply and make correct predictions and win the game then you win the nobel prize and and on the basis of that we can develop technology we can build computers cell phones develop drugs because everything works insofar as we can determine everything works as if that convenient fiction were true you can be a world champion playing hero by adopting that convenient fiction even more you must adopt that convenient fiction because if you try to stick to what is really going on because zillions of microscopic switches open and close inside silicon chips that's what's actually going on that's the reality of the game software and hardware if you're going to try to play the game by being aware of what is actually going on you're not going to win you need a convenient fiction that's what science and technology are all about does that mean that we actually know what's going on what nature is no and for exactly the same reason that the seven-year-old kid world champion in a computer game does not have a clue what is actually going on what is all the hardware and software doing inside the console and you don't need or want to know that all you want to have is a convenient fiction to predict nature's behavior that's what's actually going on and therefore to say that science will lead us to all the answers that matter that science will lead us to know understanding all the hardware and software underneath no science is one very important method to knowledge it's certainly not an exhaustive method there are things that it cannot fundamentally answer like what things are science works with convenient fictions in order to predict behavior it cannot give you direct insight into what things are for that we need philosophy for that we need introspection maybe religion excellent thank you brano so i just want to ask you one more question if i may about that early book um materialism why is baloney so i think this is most important and a wonderful um input from your work so you show it's obvious if you read the literature but modern materialism has a real problem with free will and forming a coherent understanding i think of free will can you help us understand this kind of quality of free will and how this even plays in with our limitations and why that's important i think our understanding of free will is is faulty may even be incoherent when we say i have free will we don't mean that our choices are random purely random that's not what we mean by free will that you toss a coin every time you make a choice doesn't seem right right but if we say that our choices are determined well that's also not free will because if they are determined then it's not a choice so it seems to require semantic space in between randomness and determinism the problem is there is no such semantic space things are either random or they are determined so what do we really mean by free will what we mean is that our choices are determined but they are that they are determined by my tastes by my preferences by my personal history by my goals by my purposes by my value judgments in other words choices are determined but they are determined by me by what i identify myself with they are determined by the processes that i take to be me they are not random but they are not determined by anything that i don't identify with that's what we mean now the problem is that not one of us not even the hardest core materialist on this planet sincerely views in their heart of hearts that they are the electrochemical activity in their neurons because from their own first person perspective that electrochemical activity is an abstraction you are not experiencing electrochemical activity you're experiencing your preferences your dispositions you're experiencing your fears your tastes your likes your dislikes that's what you identify with because that's what you're directly acquainted with neurons firing inside your head is an abstraction so it's a theoretical abstraction yes one could crack your head open with a mirror on top and look those are your neuro inspiring but you would still not identify with that because they are then perceived but not felt you don't feel that is that it is the electrical activity in your neurons that determines your choices that's not what you feel you feel that your choices are determined by what you by by the tastes that you feel by the preferences that you feel by the goals that you feel not by electrochemical activity now from that perspective analytic idealism would grant would grant you free will because it would it say it says that um the electrochemical activity your brain is just a representation of your dispositions your tastes your preferences your disposition states and preferences these are the things in themselves this is what's this is what really exists it's your experience that's what really exists the electrochemical activity in your brain is a rather it's a representation of that of those experiences in other words it's what those experiences look like from an external perspective therefore your choices are determined by the thing in itself by your tastes by your dispositions by your goals this is what's actually determining your choices brain activity is not determined in it reactivity is just what these things look like from an outside perspective ergo you do have free will from that's perspective in that sense now if you dig deeper can are you free to choose your tastes your dispositions uh your your goals your preferences schopenhauer arthur schopenhauer a famous western philosopher from the early 19th century would say no you are free to you are free to act according to your to your will but you are not free to will your will because if you were we would all be infinitely happy whatever the situation i have in my life right now i would choose to want exactly that above all else so if i am serving a life sentence in solitary confinement i would choose that that's exactly what i want and i would be in a sort of cathartic state throughout my life sentence everybody would be infinitely happy is that what's happening no we don't get to choose our goals our tastes our dispositions our likes and dislikes our fears our ones we are willed and then we are free to act according to that will but we are not free to will what we will so we have free will in the sense that we can act according to our will but that will is itself not free um and that is very very good because if we were free to will our will life would be absolutely meaningless there would be no impetus that is authentic that is natural that it's coming from the foundation level of nature something that nature wants to express through you um everything would be by now because we would just choose what to will according to convenience it would be a universe of pure banality a catastrophic cosmic situation um so what actually happens is that nature wills through us and that's exactly how i think personally things should be um without it there would be no such a thing as a life of service without it there would be no go no meaning no telos there would be no sacrifice in the original meaning of the word to sacrifice is to make sacred none of that would exist there would be no such a thing as the will of god or the will of nature which is the term i tend to use thanks for that bernardo and yeah we've only really just touched the surface of your wonderful work and there's many different books that i've enjoyed that i would most highly commend to people so uh if they want to take it from there then i'd recommend read those so just um to close for today bernardo and again i most appreciate your time it's been fantastic so is there anything else that you're working on there at the moment or that you still feel the passion to get involved in the future i am most of my work now is as the director of essentia foundation which is a non-profit that promotes ideal is more you know idealism in its many forms the notion that reality is essentially mental not in your mind alone not in my mind alone but mentally in essence it's made of trans personal mental processes out there that look to us like what we call matter once they are observed so that's the the main line of my daily activities in parallel i have been gestating a new book a new book about the western mind um i think mainstream materialism has done such a degree of damage to um the western tradition which precedes it by thousands of years and materialism is more or less modern phenomenon some people say well materialism started with democritus no they don't understand what democracies meant them democracies didn't mean that there were these things fundamentally outside an independent of mind that's not democracies idea materialism material is modern materialism is a post-enlightenment thing even the original enlightenment members people like uh um one of the two authors of alliancy clopedi one of the founding documents of the enlightenment he's on record saying materialism doesn't quite work but we need it as a weapon against the church it was some point in the 19th century that everything literally went to hell we lost sight of the ball completely and modern materialism was born so it's about two centuries old and it it it may be what is mainstream now but the western tradition is much older goes much deeper has a lot more depth and subtlety and nuance and i want to write a book about that and about my personal relationship with the western tradition and all the things with lost with lost for instance sorry i'm speaking too much but just to give you an idea um what is playing my mind right now what i consider to be important right now the whole understanding in the west today about well-being is based on this notion that your life is about you and my life is about me this is ridiculous this is horrendous how did this happen to the western tradition we have always known that our lives are not about us that life is sacrificial life is a is an is an endeavor of service that it's not about us and it's precisely because that's that it's meaningful and it's precisely because of that that it has depth and meaning and feels good but now we say that well my life's about me therefore i must be happy that's the only possible goal in life is that you be happy because your life's about you but of course nature makes it impossible we can never be happy all the time happiness will always be ephemeral it comes and goes very quickly it escapes through our fingers and therefore we are all unhappy because we should be happy because life is about us but we can't be happy oh it's a disaster and then the whole industry of self-help you know it's a show sorry about the word but we've turned the the depth of the western tradition into a show of banality and egocentrism it's tragic and i feel compelled to write about that that's what i'm doing fantastic i must look forward to bernardo and i i really appreciate your time today thank you so much and god bless you thanks for having me it's been a [Applause] can pleasure me i'm on my way i'm going dead

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Published: Sat May 07 2022