Bernardo Kastrup, the philosopher and computer scientist who has developed the position he calls analytic idealism, gives a talk in Pinchbeck's series. He begins with the metaphysics he rejects: physicalism, on which only unconscious, purely quantitative matter exists and all qualities are manufactured inside the skull. Against it he sets the hard problem of consciousness, the 2022 Nobel-recognized experimental work indicating that physical properties are not definite prior to measurement, and cases where brain activity falls while experience becomes richer, as under psychedelics, breathwork and cardiac arrest. He traces objective idealism from the Indus Valley through Schopenhauer's 1818 formulation, distinguishing it from Berkeley's subjective version. The closing section develops dissociation and emotionally bound complexes, which Kastrup speculates could persist past a dissociative boundary and be captured by a later one. Pinchbeck notes points of disagreement between them.
Guest: Bernardo Kastrup
In brief
- Kastrup argues that physicalism never specifies how brain activity produces experience, and that this vagueness perversely functions to make the position almost unfalsifiable.
- He treats the hard problem as a deduction gap: no measurement of particle positions and momenta yields what it is like to taste a strawberry.
- He cites the 2022 Nobel-recognized results as showing that quantifiable properties such as momentum, charge and spin cannot be said to exist before measurement, with many-worlds and superdeterminism the only escapes, both of which he considers evidentially empty.
- He notes that the expected correlation between metabolic brain activity and richness of experience breaks down under psychedelics, breathwork and cardiac arrest.
- Kastrup argues that worldviews are replaced rather than merely abandoned, so materialism requires a successor, which he takes to be a form of objective idealism.
- He speculates that emotionally charged complexes could hold together after a dissociative boundary ends and be picked up by a later dissociative process, which would account for reports of reincarnation.
Full text
All right. So I I'll talk about idealism because it's what most of you expect me to talk about. I guess I'll give you a general overview of what analytic idealism is. Uh but I will start with trying to motivate it. We we live um in a culture in which the mainstream worldview as far as metaphysics is concerned is a so-called mainstream physicalism or materialism in the vernacular. And it says that the only thing that really exists out there is unconscious matter which is exhaustively describable through numbers through quantities and has no intrinsic qualities. All qualities are supposed to be somehow generated by the brain inside our heads.
That world view tells you that the world you see, the qualities you see, the colors, the flavors, the melodies, the textures you see out there, they are in fact all inside your head because they are somehow produced by your brain within your skull. And as such um the inner surface of your skull is literally beyond everything you see beyond this the stars as you see them in the sky at night beyond the walls of the room where you are right now because all of these stuff you're experiencing as the world is created inside your head. Uh of course that creation is modulated by something abstract that is really out there. Something that corresponds to the stars in the sky. something that corresponds to the walls you see.
But the the stars you see, the walls you see, those are inside your head. The inner surf surface of your skull is beyond them all. How the brain does that is left unanswered by physicalism. Um, and of course this is a weakness of physicalism, but is in a fantastic turn of logic. Um it is in practice used as a strength of physicalism because you see since physicalism doesn't tell you how brain activity leads to experience then any brain activity anywhere in the brain can justify any experience under physicalist premises. That lack of definition of how it works uh makes physicalism almost unfalsifiable as far as accounting for experience.
Now there are many problems with this. I already mentioned some but there are some problems that are not polymical. They are acknowledged um in philosophy and in science. One of them is the so-called hard problem of consciousness which says that there is nothing about quantities such as meters uh kilograms uh angular momentum hertz jewels. There is nothing about these quantities in terms of which we could deduce the qualities of experience. So you can measure everything you want about your brain, the position and momentum of every subatomic particle that forms your brain. Um, and you would not be able to deduce in principle from that what it feels like to taste a strawberry, what it feels like to be hungry, what it feels like to fall in love.
So there is this this deduction abyss in between the things materialism knowledges to exist which is quantities and nature is given which is the qualities of our experience. There are other problems in in foundations of physics. We know now there there's extremely compelling evidence um has won the Nobel Prize in 2022 in fact that um physical properties that can be quant quantified um such as momentum um charge spin these properties cannot be said to exist before you measure them. Um I can elaborate on this afterwards but I would just briefly uh make the statement here at this point. Um to avoid the conclusion that all physical properties are a product of measurement you have to entertain one of two fantastic theoretical fantasies for which we have absolutely zero empirical evidence.
One of them is the many worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett and the other one is super determinism which tells you that um measurements only seem to contradict materialism because it's impossible for us to make the measurements measurements that that uh um that would reveal materialism to be true. That is superdeterminism for you. Um so if we just accept what experiments are telling us um if all physical properties are a result of measurement then what you measure is not physical because what you measure had to be there before you measured it. That's straightforward logic. Um also in neuroscience of consciousness um the expected linear correlation between um metabolism or brain activity in the neuroorlates of consciousness um and the intensity and richness of experience that expected correlation is it can be broken under several circumstances.
It's broken under psychedelics. It's broken under um uh breath work. it's broken under cardiac arrest. Um there's a number of circumstances um in which you can get um less neurocoralates of consciousness, less activity in the neuroorates of consciousness and in the entire brain for that matter and richer and more intense experience. So all of these are problems of our current worldview. The problem is that historically we never abandon a world view just because it has been shown to be untenable. We only replace world views. We u we cannot tolerate a vacuum of world views. We cannot just say well materialism is wrong but I don't know what is right.
So let's live in suspension right now. History shows that we are incapable of doing that. So to replace materialism with the next most plausible thing which almost certainly is not the ultimate truth because we are monkeys. Monkeys are not in the business of ultimate truths but monkeys can correct prior mistakes of their of them themselves and and get their act together a little bit more. This getting our act together may be idealism, some form of objective idealism which is a philosophy that has existed for at least three and a half thousand years uh amongst humanity. Um it's probable origins are somewhere in the Indos Valley Pakistan, India maybe part of Iran.
Um and in the west um it has been around explicitly for at least two or 300 years. Uh Bishop Barkley articulated a subjective form of idealism which is which I think is wrong and it's not what I'm going to talk about today. But Schopenhauer already in 1818 articulated an objective form of idealism very similar to what I'm going to share with you today. So what is this analytic idealism which is one formulation of objective idealism? uh it is the following. It starts by acknowledging that there is an external world. There are physicists today very serious very smart people who do not acknowledge that who say physics is about predicting what we will see next.
It's not the study of some external world objective out there that we cannot know to be the case or not since we are locked within ourselves and we can only perceive things. So physics is about what we see next and not what the objective world really looks like. So they stay away even from that. Um I am more old-fashioned. I I I find it very difficult to not acknowledge that there is an objective world out there that does not depend on our fantasies, our affirmations, uh our wishes, our preferences, our tastes. It is what it is and it would still be there if we are not around.
Analytic idealism acknowledges that there is an object world with states that do not depend on us, do not depend on our presence, do not depend on our actions. However, analytic idealism, we will go ahead and say, but the states that constitute the external world are themselves experiential, mental, qualitative, just like the states that constitute us. Our inner life, which is all we ever have, is constituted of experiential states. The colors you see, the thoughts you experience, the belly ache, the the the the the disappointment, these are all mental states. Um the idea is that the world is made of mental states too. Not your mental states or my mental states.
There are mental states out there. They would still exist even if our mental states were not around but they are mental. And what separates us from the mental states of the world is a dissociative boundary. Dissociation being a well-known phenomenon in in psychiatry. It's a process by means of which what is effectively one field of subjectivity seems to partition itself or to fragment itself into seemingly distinct uh centers of awareness, centers of consciousness. Um in extreme forms it's considered pathological. It used to be called multiple personality disorder. If I say that you all know now what dissociation is. Uh now it's called um dissociative identity disorder.
It's it's a reality. It's a common reality. You can ask any psychiatrist with a practice and they tell you they regularly get patients with higher or lesser forms of dissociative disorder. Um we dissociate when we forget something that we know we know. We become separated from a part of our minds where the memory is. We dissociate. This is not not pathological. We dissociate when we fall asleep and dream. During your dream, you think that you are your dream avatar, not the rest of the dream. The people, the buildings, the cars, the trees, the animals, the stuff going around you. You think you're not that, but you are.
It's your mind doing all that. So during a sleep state, your mind dissociates. Now, under analytic idealism, life is what a dissociative process in this one field of subjectivity that constitutes nature looks like. That's what biology is. Biology is the external appearance, the image uh of dissociation, of a dissociative process, a self-inforced dissociative process. That's what biology is. And that's why I cannot have direct access to your thoughts. Between you and me, there are two dissociative boundaries, your own and mine. And that's why I don't know what's going on in the galaxy of Andromeda right now or even in Japan. It's because I am dissociated from the mental states that constitute Japan or the galaxy of Andromeda.
What we call matter or physicality under analytic idealism is what mental states on the other side of our dissociative boundary look like when we observe them. Think of it as the dashboard of an airplane. The airplane is dissociated from the sky by its skin, its aluminum skin. But an airplane has sensors to make measurements of the states of the sky outside the external sky like u humidity, uh temperature, u wind direction, speed and so forth. Those measurements are then presented to the pilot in the form of dial indications on a dashboard. Now pretend the airplane has no windows. By the way, this is the future of aviation.
Airplanes will not have windows because glass is fragile and it's not good for super transic uh travel. But even in normal airplanes, um if it's dark and there is a storm outside, pilots have to fly by instruments. You have to be qualified in that to be a be able to fly a commercial airplane. You have to be able to fly without your windshield, without seeing what's out there. So in that case the dashboard provides the indications you have about the external state. The dashboard is accurate. It conveys conveys accurate information about what's happening outside. If you ignore the dashboard, you will crash the plane and die.
You have to take the dashboard seriously. But the dashboard is not the sky outside. It's a representation thereof. We are like pilots of that airplane. Uh we are piloting an airplane without windows since our birth. And what we have is a dashboard. The contents of perception. The stuff you see here, touch, smell, taste, your tongue, your eard drums, your retinas. These are sensors like the sensors of the airplane. They convey accurate information about the world to you and they present this information in a particular way which aims at, you know, maximizing the chance that you will promptly react to environmental challenges and opportunities and cap your internal entropy.
There's there's a lot of technical stuff behind it, but the information is accurate. The mistake we make is that we take perception or matter the stuff we touch, see, taste, smell, physicality, the contents of perception, which are indications on a dashboard. We take it to be the world. And that's why we think the world is physical and not mental, even though the dashboard indications are themselves mental because we experience the contents of perception. So under analytic idealism there is a real world out there that does not depend on us but we never get to see it directly. There is a dashboard in between. That dashboard is the physical world.
You have your own physical world. I have mine. Our dashboards are separate but they are both modulated by the same set of mental states that actually constitute the external world. Therefore your dashboard indications are consistent with mine. And upon that confirmation that we all seem to be experiencing the same world, which we are, it's just mental, not the physical stuff on the dashboard. We think that the world is physical because we never got the chance to look out the window. We don't have a window. All we have is the dashboard. So, we think the world is physical. The world is the dashboard. That's the mistake. And if you realize that all problems stop, you no longer have the hard problem of consciousness.
Because the heart problem of consciousness is about starting from non-mental states and deducing mental states. The problem is the non-mental states are invented. They are a theoretical abstraction. They have no meaning because the physical descriptions of the world have meaning in so far they describe something qualitative. The stuff we see, the contents of our perception. If we say that our descriptions preede everything including perception, it becomes meaningless. That's the hard problem of consciousness right there. That problem disappears if you understand the real world to be mental. Um the measurement problem in physics disappears. Of course, physical properties only arise upon measurement because physical properties are dashboard indications.
Dashboards indicate nothing unless the sensors make a measurement. If the airplane sensors don't measure anything, the dashboard shows nothing. The needles don't move. That's why there is no physical world until we make a measurement. But the thing measured is there. It's just mental, not physical. This is an issue only if you think that physical states are the only real states that can exist. So if experiment tells you physical states arise from measurement, now you're discombobulated. What is it that you measure? Well, you don't have that problem here. There are real mental states out there. they aren't physical and physicality does emerge from measurement. And regarding the hard the the the neuroscientific problem of why sometimes experience doesn't correlate neatly u with brain activity, it's very easily explainable under analytic idealism.
Brain activity is not what causes inner experience. It is what inner experience looks like when observed on a dashboard. Brain activity is an image, a an appearance, a representation of inner experience, not the cause of experience. Therefore, unlike causes, images don't need to be complete. You you are seeing an image of me right now on your screen, but that image is not complete. It doesn't tell you what's going on in the back of my head, under my t-shirt, under my skin, the details of my metabolism. The image is accurate. It shows you an accurate representation of me, but it's not complete. In exactly the same way, brain activity, because it's an image of inner experience.
It's what inner experience looks like when represented on a dashboard. That image doesn't need to be complete. There can be a lot going on in inner experience that is not that you can't find back on dashboard representations because maybe we don't have all the sensors or maybe we didn't evolve to pick out everything that is salient because it doesn't have a bearing on our survival. There may be a lot more going on out there than perception allows us to see because it would be just cognitive overload evolutionarily speaking to be able to pick all of that out. So that's my stick. That's uh that's my message.
I think it's 20 minutes now, so I'm reverting back to Daniel. You're muted to Daniel. Thank you, Bernardo. That's so fascinating as always. I I just always want to just like, you know, hover over this and and and try to like integrate it. I mean um um yeah I mean I know that uh it sounds like your realization of this I'm kind of curious your personal story a little bit like you had a um kind of scientific realization when you were working with CERN but then also I mean you must have had a um you know some kind of initiatory jump that that made it real for you.
I'm wondering if you could just touch upon the work that you've done to integrate this this uh somewhat alien perspective from what we normally think. Yeah, for me as you said it it started in a very rational way, very analytic way, not an embodied way. I didn't have spiritual experience or transcendent insight. Um this came out of work I was done at CERN at CERN. I was working for a while um on a data acquisition system and we had these two solutions for it. One classical hardware and the other one neuronet networks and this was in the mid9s before neural networks were accepted as a valid way to solve things.
It was very contentious back then. Both alternatives worked very well, but of course we chose the classical one, but it stayed in my mind the reality that we could build an artificial neuronet network that was just as good as physicists in identifying what detectors were measuring. Um, and then I started to think, well, if I can create a computer that is as intelligent as a physicist, what does it take me to make it conscious? And I sort of broke my head against this wall for a few years trying to figure out what I had to change to have a reason to believe that the computer became conscious and not just intelligent. In other words, to believe that the computations performed were accompanied by experience just like the computations of our brain are accompanied by experience.
And I realized that whatever I would change in the hardware, it would give me no more and no less reason to think of it as conscious because all changes had to do with structure and function and nothing to do with experience. And at some point it dawned on me, I'm I am hitting my head against this wall because I took a wrong turn somewhere in my line of thinking. I'm making some assumption that is unexamined and unjustified. And I concluded the unjustified assumption was this this idea that consciousness is created out of specific material arrangements. I could tell you a lot more about this, but that was the seinal realization that eventually brought me to rejecting physicalism as completely untenable, even internally inconsistent.
Um, and forced me to devise a new world view for myself because I couldn't live in a vacuum. It was only later um many years later that um this analytic conclusions started really sinking in from from here started sinking into the body. Uh I didn't expect it to happen. I have a friend Rupert Spyra who predicted it years ago. We were having dinner drinking wine in an Italian restaurant and I told him yeah know everything I know it's analytic. I don't really know this stuff. It's all intermediated by concept and symbols because I was sort of a bit jealous of the peace of mind that Rupert uh sort of radiated.
He does that in real life too, not only during during during seminars and then he looked at me and said it will happen. It is impossible for you to know this conceptually and for that knowledge not to sort of start trickling down and sinking into the body. It will happen. And I had a very bad opinion of myself back then. I still have. It's better now. I'm much more loving loving towards myself now. But I thought this would never happen to me. I'm too hard-headed. I'm I'm I'm I'm like a pig, you know. I I I always I always I'm always in my head. Very hard-headed.
It will never happen to me. Uh but it it did. One day I woke up and I looked back and I thought, "Oh gosh, he was right. Rupert was right." It did sink in. So it happened very slowly. Um I never had sort of a sudden spiritual insight or anything. Um yeah a couple of things that that's fascinating. You never but did you also do like a meditation practice or was it more like a just contemplation and reflection? I did uh a meditation practice on but once but um for a couple of years but as part of a sort of research program um you know when the the the psychedelics were were becoming popular again with the studies at Johns Hopkins in 2006 and seven and I thought no I'm I'm thinking about consciousness I'm working on this stuff uh I I have to be aware of what psychedelics do so as part of that research program uh that I did with psychedelics and binaural rhythms and mind machines and meditation and breath work.
I I did that as a part of a two-year long research program. Um in that context I did it and I did have extraordinary experiences. Um but I don't have a meditation practice right now. My meditation is living life. Life is the teacher. Uh I wanted to get into I really enjoyed your book more than allegory. And that's kind of where you talk about how um this analytic idealist perspective suggests that everything we experience in the sort of consensus reality on some level is a bit like a like a like an object in a dream and as in a dream we can use analysis you know yungian or freian like we can bring different forms of analysis to bear and understand that that these are symbols that are laden with meaning.
Uh and of course this is exactly the way indigenous animist cultures understand their their reality. Uh so that's something that was really fascinating to me. Uh and um yes and also I guess in a way traditional religious cultures also. Um so I guess I'm curious yeah kind of in a weird way. I have some ideas around this, but what are kind of like the practical applications going forward of this kind of understanding uh where the world doesn't just become an accidental kind of like hubbhub of of things that happen to happen but actually has a kind of a symbolic uh dimension of kind of archetypal unfolding let's say.
Yeah. Under analytic idealism everything is one field of subjectivity, one mind, one consciousness if you will. Um and that field has an impetus towards self-exitation and its excitations are the world as perceived by us as represented uh in our own cognitive dashboard that evolution has constructed over 4.2 billion years on this planet. If that is the case then the contents of your perception the things you see the world the events the dynamics you see around you they are not the ultimate reality. They are representations of an ultimate reality. They are symbols. Um they point to something that underlies them. Just like the indications of a dashboard are not the thing in itself, but they point to something that underlies them.
The indication of air speed on the dashboard is not the air speed. It's a representation of air flow outside. Same for humidity and all the other sensors. So the world you see are like dial indications. They are symbols of something that is behind the world from you. And in that sense, the world acquire quite literally uh meaning semantic content. It points to something uh behind itself, something that underlies it. And if you really in sort of live this perspective, if it sinks into your the whole of your being and you live in a way that is informed by this understanding, then then the world becomes a book to be read.
Everything has meaning. Now there are two disclaimers that I want to make. In saying that everything has meaning, I am not saying that everything has the meaning we think it has. Only the schizophrenic thinks that the schizophrenic will derive relations across everything and and attribute all kinds of meanings to everything. I am not endorsing that. I'm not endorsing that our projections are real. That the the meanings we infer because of our wish fulfillment fantasies and our traumas. I'm not saying that all of that's true. I'm saying everything has meaning of its own intrinsic meaning that doesn't depend on us but that meaning is not necessarily what we project onto it and finding the difference between one and the other is something that I think comes with maturity at life teaches at some point and the other disclaimer um has to do with your illusion to animism.
Yes, I think consciousness underlies everything. But where the boundaries of particular perspectives lie are not necessarily the boundaries between objects. In other words, I think this bottle of water exists because it is an excitation of consciousness. So consciousness underlies it. This bottle of water exists in consciousness, but it isn't necessarily conscious. It doesn't necessarily have a private point of view of its own. This is very important. I think living beings have private points of view of their own because dissociation looks like biology and living beings are biology. But I don't think objects have private points of view of their own. I don't think two rocks represent two different dissociative processes.
I think we carve out the world into objects for convenience. But this carving out is merely nominal. It does not have a sort of anic grounding. Um to speak of a table or um a piece of wood with four legs and speak of the four legs as separate objects is is based on convenience. It's merely nominal. There are no objects out there. There is only one inanimate world. Objects are things we impose onto the world for our own convenience. And the mistake I think a lot of people make is to think that the world has as its intrinsic onic structure the structure of our language that we have separate words for separate things doesn't mean that those things are separate.
Uh a concrete example is fist. We have a word for fist. Here is the fist. Where is the fist? The fist has disappeared. It just violated the law of conservation of energy. You see, this is the kind of mistake you make when you mistake the structure of language, the word fist, for the structure of the world. And I think that's the animist mistake. It's to think of everything we have a word for, as a thing separate from other things which has its own private point of view. that I think is flawed. I think the boundaries of different points of view follow the boundaries of biology. Yeah, I don't know if I completely agree that that's how animist cultures that I visited uh like you know the Ki and Colombia or the Hopi necessarily understand the nature of reality.
But what I wanted to um kind of I acknowledge that I acknowledge that this may be our own western misunder of what animism is. Exactly. But I want to delve in a little bit here because this is something that's just been fascinating to me. I mean and I know I know you've also discussed a little bit like the psychic and the paranormal and how so for instance like the materialist reductive worldview you know which is still the governing structure in the mainstreammies institutions completely rejects you know psychic and paranormal phenomena for the most part. And we're having some people in this course who are you know like David Luke who's a parasychologist Dean Raiden who studies um psychic phenomena Jeffrey Krypal and so on who authors the of the impossible and as I was exploring shamanism and psychedelics I had many many different um psychic and paranormal experiences that I I didn't actually believe in you know beforehand and also when I visited different indigenous cultures I discovered that they had kind of like a field uh of understanding in which in which different phenomena that were like impossible from our way of understanding the world would occur.
So for instance the ki you know would know things like let's say you were in your room at night and a hummingbird you know came into your room with like a butterfly in its mouth. They would say oh like that means your cousin you know has probably you know gotten ill in another city and you know you should go visit them or something and often you'd find out that whatever weird thing they had this idea about was was true. Uh so so I I guess what I began to think is that if if there's a sort of underlying field of consciousness that's then kind of like sculpted and shaped by like human societies um who maybe overdevelop uh over a long period of time a kind of field of resonance uh with their local physical environment and that also leads to them developing a certain like rhetorical system, mythological system and they're actually able to kind of make different things happen um you know that we experience is impossible within the local container and and maybe the Rupert Sheldrick's ideas of like morphic resonance or morphonetic fields is a way for us to begin to conceptualize this and and yeah so I'm curious how that resonates with you and and what you think if that if that's clear. Yeah, what you said is clear. Um I have never been particularly motivated by the paranormal and and not out of prejudice for the following reason.
I think the normal is incredibly mysterious and I'm overwhelmed by the mystery of the normal every moment of the day. So there there is very little psychic energy left in me to develop an interest or the paranormal. I'm already overwhelmed by the mystery of the normal. Um that said, um there are two things at least that go under the label of paranormal that I think only um surprising level of theoretical commitment prevents people from seeing and considering rather bal even uh one of them is so-called synchronicities. They happen. All right. There are correspondences of meaning between our own inner experiential events and events in the world.
And yes, some of these has to do with confirmation bias. We only see what's meaningful. We never see what's not meaningful. But even taking into account all that sometimes the correspondences of meaning are so specific so detailed that you you have to be very theoretically committed to something not to to see it happen uh in front of you. I have had several experiences of synchronicity like this. The other thing I think happens is what can go under the label of telepathy. In other words, our private mental contents somehow leaking out into the world and being picked up by somebody else without the intermediation of language or the senses.
These two things I think are empirically but now but is happening all the time. Um and how do I reconcile analytic idealism with them? Well, that's a rather straightforward. Let's start with synchronicities. Under analytic idealism, our mind in here is the same mind as the mind out there. There is just a dissociative boundary in between. Therefore, the archetypes that govern that govern the expression of my mind in here are the same archetypes that govern the behavior of the world out there. The templates of unfolding are the same. So, it stands to reason that there will be correspondences between the two because the archetypal templates informing both are the same.
They are part of the same mind operating under the governance of the same templates of behavior, templates of mentation, the same archetypes. So synchronicities trivial. There is nothing extraordinary about it. You may expect them to happen. Again, this is not giving license to this schizophrenic idea that everything is a synchronicity that has the meaning I project onto it. I'm not saying that. I'm saying there are synchronicities that have meaning but not necessarily the schizophrenic meanings we compulsively may project onto them. The other thing telepathy um under analytic idealism it's all one mind. So how come I can't read your thoughts and you read mine? Well it's because there are two dissociative boundaries between us.
It's dissociation that ensures the the private aspect of inner experience. So dissociation is a process in nature that sort of insulates different centers of experience. But no process in nature is perfect. When it stops raining the the ground doesn't dry immediately or completely. Uh when something's burning and not everything that is combustible is actually burned. Combustion is not a perfect process. No process in nature is perfect. When it rains, it doesn't rain every water molecule that is up in the air. No process in nature is complete and perfect. Why would dissociation be? Dissociation has an obvious evolutionary advantage. You have to think of yourself as an agent separate from the environment.
Otherwise, you're not going to ensure that you would take the correct actions to survive. If you think you're the whole environment, you're not committed to your own survival. Why would you care? Oh, the body died. Well, so what? So evolutionarily um there's a clear reason why we should be dissociated. Only dissociated processes would remain until now. Everything else would would be extinct. But that dissociation will not be perfect. It it's extraordinarily implausible that it would be perfect. Every now and then it will leak. Every now and then the dissociative boundary will be porous. that it will allow for some direct commerce of mental states that others can then pick up.
So telepathy in that sense is also completely understandable under analytic idealism. And I would call both of these things uh synchronicity and telepathy not even as paranormal. Paranormal is a word that conceds too much to our current culture. It's just normal. It's natural. Very good. Um yeah, I guess for me I have a I mean you know everybody has their own um kind of lines of inquiry but I'm very interested in the psychic and paranormal. I mean um you know Dean Raiden for instance have have you done anything with him by the way? Have you have you have you had conversations with him? Uh not really.
We had some exchanges but not to the point of a proper conversation. So one of his ideas is that um psychic energy or you know sigh psi they sometimes call it uh you know is something that at the moment feels like a very weak like uh indicator. Uh but um he says it could be something like electricity right like when we first discovered electricity you know we knew there was this powerful force and people had been shocked by lightning or whatever we didn't know that we could like store it or transmit it or use it to you know to run engines or whatever. So it took generations of experiment to uh to make that happen. And similarly you know people have these extraordinary like sigh experiences um uh you know supernormal experiences and um yeah like is there a way that um that that energy of sigh could somehow be like shepherded could that almost be like um a future force source of power for accomplishing things that we don't even quite understand yet?
uh my own experiences suggest that something like that uh might be the case. Um but yeah, I'm just leaving that in your field as something that that might be more interesting to explore in the future. Um yeah, I was also uh yeah, as I said this morning, I watched this Donald Hoffman. I mean, he seems very much in your ally in terms of his thinking. Um but he was also talking about how there's a sense that um what we call consciousness can't actually probably be ever fully defined. uh because for instance um uh you know he used the model of a of a of a computer that's asked to build a model of of a computer and itself uh to to define itself fully and then is unable to then define itself because then it has the computer plus model and this kind of like infinite regression.
Do you think there's some truth to that that um there's an ultimate level in which consciousness cannot be defined or explained because everything that we're experiencing or exploring is like within this field of consciousness in a way. Yeah. Before I answer it directly, I I just wanted to share u something I noticed in the the cultural debate and I and I don't think it's healthy. Um there is a sense in which it's valid for someone to say well first before you make any argument define consciousness. Yeah. But there is also a fallacy that comes with it which is the notion that we can define it any way we want.
Um there is this thing we invented the word consciousness for and yes I can defi if I can define consciousness in any way I want then I can prove physicalism correct by word definition I can define consciousness in such a way that whatever the brain does it does that and and and it becomes silly it becomes a linguistic game if I don't mean by the word consciousness what everybody else understands it to mean then I'm just playing a silly word game that has no relevance whatsoever in any point in our culture. So yes, we should define it but should define it in a way that honors the intuition behind the word and not in an arbitrary way. The way I define it is to say consciousness is that whose excitations are our experiences or experiences in general. And and this is a sort of an indirect way of defining things. It defines consciousness in terms of its results, the results of its own excitations.
um but it doesn't define it directly. Is it possible to define it directly? Not if you're an idealist. And I and let me unpack unpack this in in science and philosophy. Um a definition of an entity is something that is based on other entities. You define an entity in terms of other entities. You can define the body in terms of organ systems. You can define organ systems in terms of tissues. You can define tissues in terms of cells, cells in terms of atoms, atoms in terms of subatomic particles, subatomic particles in terms of fields. Um, it's always in terms of the same holds for explanation. You explain something in terms of something else and that in terms of something else.
But of course, we can never keep on defining or explaining one thing in terms of another forever. Eventually, you close the loop and you start engaging circular reasoning. So there is a rock bottom level where you can no longer explain or define something in terms of another because there isn't another. It's the bottom level and then you can only define that primitive in terms of what it does and not in terms of other things. Now different metaphysics have different bottom levels. A physicist would say the bottom level are the quantum fields. I cannot define quantum fields in terms of anything else. I only define it in terms of what it does.
Subatomic particles, field excitations. That's valid for the physicalist. For the idealist, the bottom level is consciousness, subjectivity itself. So you cannot define consciousness in terms of something else because there is nothing else. You're already at the bottom level. You can only define it like the physically physicalist does for quantum fields. You can only define it in terms of what it does when it gets excited. In other words, the qualities of experience. Therefore, consciousness is that whose excitations are experiences. So yes, to answer finally answer your question, yes, as an idealist or any other metaphysical approach, there is always something that you cannot define directly. Thank you so much.
I'm going to ask you one more question, then we'll open it to the uh the audience. Uh it looks like people had teed up some interesting questions in the chat. Uh I guess the next question for you I mean the title of this course is the future of consciousness. I mean you're obviously extremely passionate about you know formulating this complex of you know this thoughts this new paradigm getting it out into the world kind of helping academic institutions kind of assimilate it and kind of shift the discourse and so on. what what do you see is the is the value or let's say the purpose you know what what how how do you think that this this um yeah is is meaningful for the future h how would let's let's say there was a general kind of shift to this sort of analytic idealist perspective uh or at least an opening to it how how would that change the dynamics of uh you know global society or what what what what what could it do uh yeah for the future yeah well first of all our relationship with death changes entirely Under physicalism, if your brain with its coherent structure is what generates your consciousness, when the brain loses that coherent structure, in other words, when you die and decompose, then there is no more you.
Under analytic idealism, the brain is what a particular namely dissociative state of consciousness looks like. So death, the end of that structure is the end of the dissociation. It's the end of a particular state of consciousness, not the end of consciousness. The your subjectivity doesn't end upon death. Death is something that happens within your subjectivity. Yes, your personal agency comes to an end. uh the narrative self comes to an end because once that little personal thing is gone, there is no way you can convince yourself that you are that little personal thing that is gone because you're still around. Well, that little thing is no longer around.
So, you can't fool yourself anymore. Your sense of self will disappear. Uh sorry, your sense of self will change. uh the personal self, the the the the narrative self uh will be revealed for what it is. It's like when you're dreaming, you think you're your dream avatar. Uh when you wake up, your dream avatar is dead. That dissociation ends. The dream dissociation that convinces you that you're your dream avatar and not the rest of the of the dream, although you are the one doing the whole thing. Uh that avatar is dead when you wake up. So the avatar doesn't survive, but you survive and you don't mourn the death of your dream avatar because you immediately understand that you were never it.
It was something you were doing and now you're not doing it anymore. And you're not going to mourn the death of something you were doing, an action, not an an entity. So I think this understanding changes our relationship with death. because of that it changes our relationship with life because now um your life can have meaning. Um everything you've learned all you know the tough lessons you've had uh along life that led you to this priceless insights you've developed um it's not all gone when you die. Uh on the contrary um if life is a dissociative process containing all these hardearned insights the product of tremendous suffering through life death the end of that dissociation is the end of the dissociative boundary and in other words it's the release of what you succeeded in acquiring your insights.
It's the release of that to the rest of nature. It's a kind of harvest um if you will. Um so life is now meaningful. You you you don't go through all this crap and entire show for nothing. Nature is learning something through you that that doesn't just disappear when you die. Now now now your life is a form of sacrifice to nature. It's a contribution to to the eyes of nature through through your lived experience. Nature figures something out about itself through our journeys. Um it also changes health. Health health care changes. Right now healthcare is based on the metaphor that we are like a mechanism like cars that needs to be fixed.
And therefore there are only two recognized avenues for health care. One is chemicals, a drug you take and the other is surgery, a direct mechanical intervention. We are leaving out another one that is crucial and it was the whole of medicine until around mid 19th century. The whole of human medicine was that that's how much we are living on the table now which is psychological intervention under analytic idealism. The body is not a mechanism outside mind. It's what a particular state of mind a dissociative state looks like. So everything in your body uh is the appearance of mental states. And yes, you know, the mental states corresponding to your liver are dissociated from your ego for very good evolutionary reasons.
If you had to explicitly think about liver function in order to do it, you would do nothing else. It's better there to be a dissociation. So the liver takes care of itself and you take care of finding food and running away from from the tiger. But everything is the image of mental states in the body and talk therapy can reach across those dissociative boundaries. We know that because there is such a thing called placebo which is an empirical reality but we sort of try not to think about it because we can't make sense of it under analytic idealism. It's the most natural thing in the world.
Your body is what mental states look like. So of course your beliefs which are mental states within you can causally interfere with the other mental states that constitute what you actually are this dissociative process and have a causal effect on them. That's the placebo effect. Mental states beliefs impacting other mental states which appear to us as the liver, the kidneys, your intestines, whatever the body, the body as a whole. uh we are leaving that uh on the table. Um medicine until around middle of the 19th century was all about the placebo effect. It was the bedside manner and the authoritative presence of the doctor telling you you are now okay, you'll be okay after you after I bleed you, after I put leeches on you, after you drink drink my snake oil.
And it worked. It worked. So under analytic idealism that that avenue opens up again. We shouldn't be treated like mechanisms anymore. We should be treated like conscious beings which is what we are. And then a form of benign deception becomes a crucial tool um in the tool set of a doctor. uh a a deliberate exploitation of the placebo effect informed by a metaphysics that explains it in a very rational and natural way. I think we need that in my country in the Netherlands. Although medicine here compared to what I see when I go to the US, medicine here is still very much okay. It's not commercialized at all.
But um there is this idea strange distorted form of ethics that um the doctor is only ethic if he's realistic towards you. And realistic is a key word that means pessimistic. That's what it actually means. Um, and if the doctor isn't pessimistic towards you, neutral and and pessimistic, that's what is allowed. Not optimistic, not encouraging. If the doctor is optimistic and encouraging towards you, you can sue him if it turns out that you can't be cured. That's the distorted insane state of our medicine today. Anyway, I could go on and on and talk about I guess what you said, I loved it, but you raised a few things that before I pass it along.
Um, one is, uh, oh, where do they go? Um, oh, I was thinking about Joe Despensza. Uh, I don't know what you think of his Joe Despensza. You are the placebo. He's a chiropractor, but he's Dr. Joe Dispensza. He's a become a major influencer and teacher. Uh, and you know, many of my friends love him and take his courses, and it's all about, you know, the power of the mind to kind of transform the body and kind of, you know, affirmations and so on. But when I read his books, I actually found them a little bit disingenuous. So for instance, he would be like um I'm really surprised if you haven't heard of him.
I'm very surprised. I I heard the name, but I I I can't I can't connect it. Oh, so in the books he'll be like um you know this, you know, Judy came to my course and she had stage four cancer and she did my meditations every day and suddenly she had spontaneous remission and now she's good. Um and you know, but then I was like, okay, that's true, but thousands of people are coming to your courses. I'm sure there's many and I think I've even heard of some who had stage four cancer but you know didn't you know have remission and passed away. Um it feels a little bit disingenuous.
I'm a little what you were describing about kind of like you know the the deceptive uh you know as some something maybe positive for physicians and rang a bell of alarm for me when I thought about people like him. Yeah. I I I it's great that you you're confronting me this way so I can express myself better. Um I don't mean that doctors should go and tell a stage four cancer patient and and say we can cure you. We everything is going to be okay. We know what we're doing. We will cure you. That's not what I am advocating for. What I'm advocating for is don't tell the patient uh that statistically the patient has 99.999% chance of dying and that there is nothing you can do about it.
Stay open and say look there are people who have come out of this and it's true. It's not a lie. Yeah, there are people who have had spontaneous remission. So, we are going to try to do something that increases your chances of going through spontaneous remission. And what will turn out? Well, we will see its nature at the end of the day. So uh instead of the essentially negative approach mechanistic uh approach that we have today um doctors the GPS in the Netherlands today they don't even touch you anymore. Yeah. They hear your story and they order exams. So the tool that the doctor from the 19th century had which is even if it doesn't really work but the doctor touches you uh listens to your heart and taps on your belly.
It's like the shaman. It's some smoke and mirror is there but it it's it's benign smoke and mirror mirrors. Doing that creates a relationship between the doctor and the patient through which the authority of the doctor can be picked up by the patient and lead to positive results. That's what doctors exploited uh for centuries uh before the middle of the 19th century. Yeah. I mean, I want to turn over to Mark, but I guess there's a concept of limbic system resonance, right? That sometimes like with like with talk therapy, it's not really the talking that's helping necessarily somebody who's disregulated, just being in the presence of somebody who's got a more regulated lyic system.
Um, uh, Bernardo, have you have you ever read Amit Gwami's book, Physics of the Soul? No. Might be interesting to you because he he was a physicist. He wrote a manual on quantum mechanics. uh he um and so he kind of like tried to extrapolate from what he had discovered through quantum mechanics into sort of envisioning how there could be things like you know subtle bodies or reincarnation. So his ideas that kind of while we're alive you know we have these you know repeating reinforcing patterns of like thinking action and willing and so on feeling and these somehow maintain kind of connected as you know quantum aggregates you know non-lo locally.
So after we pass away, there's still this sort of momentum of these quantum aggregates that in a way look to you know continue their uh their journey. I mean um uh and maybe seek to reincarnate but based on you know whatever whatever those karmic patterns which are sort of inscribed in this way. Uh there's that book uh Ian Stevenson wrote that book where biology and reincarnation intersect and he found that there were like children all around the world who had spont spontaneous uh recall of their past lives and then often it was like um their past lives were people who had died very suddenly. So it' be like somebody in their 30s who got hit by a truck or something and and then the the child wakes up at six and it's like you know oh like I have a I have a family I have a wife I have kids I live in Agra and Stevenson would actually take this person to this other town and like find the families and so on. Uh super fascinating.
So yeah. So I mean I guess um I think physics of the soul is interesting as it suggests how these mechanisms might work and like maybe somebody who has a very long life into their 90s and kind of like you know then then passes away doesn't have a need to sort of reincarnate so quickly like the you know the the patterns are more diffuse or more complete but if you die in the midst of it you know you want to like come right back back into the action you feel like something's uncompleted or something or that aggregate of of your of your being in a way. C can I speak to this a little bit? Uh if we have time. Yeah.
Uh I I often get this question. What about reincarnation in my model? Um in my model there is no personal agency that remains dissociated. Um there may be one but I don't see enough empirical reason to entertain that hypothesis. I think death is is the end of the dissociation since nothing is left behind of metabolism for us to speak of some surviving level of of individuation of of personal individual agency. However, however, um, since the early days of depth psychology with Jung and Freud, they talked about complex seas and complex seeds are psychic or experiential content that are mutually evocative at an emotional level and therefore tend to stay to remain associated with one another.
Think of it like a um the memory of cotton candy. the taste of cotton candy, that memory is associated with maybe the memory of a parent that passed away or or the memory of um a little festival in your community. Um so the all these different experiential contents they tend to stay together because they are mutually evocative at an emotional level. So it's like chemistry they react with one another and bind to one another. It is this result of this binding because of these emotionally charged cognitive associations between different mental states that are called complexes. So you may have a mother complex which is related to the memories of being in your mother's lap or your mother's voice uh with some maternal um features that you perceive in other women around you.
They all react together and form a complex. um and these complexes uh do not depend on dissociative boundaries to remain. So it is possible that the memories of a lifetime because they are so emotionally charged they react with each other and even after the end of the dissociation the dissociative boundary that kept them private even if they are released in the broader co cognitive context of the mind of nature they still go together because they are complexes that react with one another that evoke one another and therefore stay together. It is possible that these complexes then find themselves captured in another dissociative boundary that forms later on and that may account for what we call uh reincarnation. I think uh these highly reactive complexes will remain their structure will remain even after the end of the dissociation and they may be picked out by other dissociative processes that form later.
Awesome. Thank you so much Bernardo that was fantastic. uh always uh really uh exciting. I even enjoy our somewhat you know hearing their points of disagreement which maybe when another form for format we'll go dive deeper into Thank you Daniel. Thanks for the opportunity and thank thanks everybody for for the interaction. It was lovely.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.