I’ve never encountered a contemporary philosopher who has the breadth of knowledge that Kastrup does across multiple domains (e.g. physics, psychoanalysis, computer science, etc.). Most academics are restricted to their silos of expertise, and we need more of these cross-disciplinary intellectuals.
This is by far the most philosophical discussion with Kastrup i have seen, well done to the host for leading such a deep discussion! It's even way beyond Kastrup's doctoral dissertation video available online. I have not read his thesis, so i cannot say if this level was already there, or is it acquired over the years. But this video was one of my favorites, the one i would recommend anyone to watch after they have the basics covered.
Superficially, Bernardo Kastrup SEEMS to be promulgating the most ancient spiritual teaching of Advaita Vedanta (as found in the Upanishadic texts of India) but due to reasons I won't go into at length here, his understanding is rather flawed. If one carefully listens to any of his monologues or interview videos, it is obvious (at least it is obvious to those who are truly enlightened) that he regularly confuses and conflates discrete consciousness (as emerging from the neural networks of animals) and UNIVERSAL Consciousness (which is the all-pervasive, eternal ground of all being, more appositely termed "The Tao", "Brahman" or "Infinite Awareness"). He also believes in (limited) freedom of will, which is, of course, ludicrous, and his understanding of suffering is truly infantile, which is unfortunate, since the eradication of suffering is the goal of life. In order to PROPERLY understand the distinction between the two aforementioned categories of consciousness, you are welcome to email me for a copy of "A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity", which are the most authoritative and accurate precepts extant. My address is on my UA-cam homepage. However, my main criticism of Kastrup is not with his metaphysics, it is, rather, his METAETHICS. He is, objectively speaking, afflicted with a demonic mentality, as demonstrated with his support of all things contrary to Dharma (the law, and societal duties), such as egalitarianism, feminism, homosexuality, and socialism. In a recent interview, for example, Bernie displayed abject ignorance when discussing the topic of animal consumption. Hopefully, he will one day realize how incredibly hypocritical he is in this regard, and become a compassionate VEGAN. 🌱 After all, to criticize Bernardo for his teachings being only, let's say, ninety percent accurate, would be silly, since, compared with almost every other person who has ever lived, his philosophical understanding is fairly sound. Yet, what is the point of being even TOTALLY correct about metaphysics, when one's metaethics and normative ethics is fundamentally flawed? Furthermore, Bernado has admitted that he has struggled with mental health issues for several decades. I would suggest he flee to the loving arms of an ACTUAL spiritual master in order to learn Dharma (as well, of course, correct his flawed metaphysics). Peace! P.S. It seems Bernie Boy has BLOCKED at least one of my UA-cam accounts, so if you are reading this, you are indeed fortunate. ;)
@@FilipinaVegana I think it's you who have a flawed understanding of what kastrup actually says, because he and Rupert Spira have done a deep dive comparison of their views, and they turned out to be identical.
@@FilipinaVegana Being a monarchist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist vegan who follows Advaita Vedanta is a bizarre combination of worldviews. You will find few people to be in complete agreement with you.
@@FilipinaVegana Bernardo's model is not even close to Advaita. Also it is a real pity that these ancient Knowledges (not only Advaita but all including non-dual ones) are very rarely mentioned and elaborated upon in all these consciousness interviews.
I really hope and pray the two continue a conversation because you’re headed in a direction we really need to go to bring about a real paradigm shift for humanity. It needs to go deep and have a firm foundation so it sinks into the culture as a whole. The analytic approach is in my view absolutely necessary.
Speaking slower and more clearly, like Bernardo does intentionally, is a big plus to being able to understand the arguments and connections between ideas. As a frequent listener to discussions like these, I would highly recommend that other idealists try this strategy and approach; it is very helpful, in many ways.
Idealism: Metaphysical Idealism is the view that the objective, phenomenal world is the product of an IDEATION of the mind, whether that be the individual, discrete mind of a personal subject, or otherwise that of a Universal Conscious Mind (often case, a Supreme Deity), or perhaps more plausibly, in the latter form of Idealism, Impersonal Universal Consciousness Itself (“Nirguna Brahman”, in Sanskrit).
The former variety of Idealism (that the external world is merely the product of an individual mind) seems to be a form of solipsism. The latter kind of Idealism is far more plausible, yet it reduces the objective world to nothing but a figment in the “Mind of God”. Thus, BOTH these forms of Idealism can be used to justify all kinds of immoral behaviour, on the premise that life is just a sort of dream in the mind of an individual human, or else in the consciousness of the Universal Mind, and therefore, any action that is deemed by society to be immoral takes place purely in the imagination (and of course, those who favour this philosophy rarely speak of how non-human animals fit into this metaphysical world-view, at least under the former kind of Idealism, subjective Idealism). Idealism (especially Monistic Idealism), is invariably the metaphysical position proffered by neo-advaita teachers outside of India (Bhārata), almost definitely due to the promulgation of the teachings in the West of Indian (so-called) “gurus” such as Mister Venkataraman Iyer (normally referred to by his assumed name, Ramana Maharshi). See the Glossary entry “neo-advaita”. This may explain why such (bogus) teachers use the terms “Consciousness” and/or “Awareness”, instead of the Vedantic Sanskrit word “Brahman”, since with “Brahman” there is ultimately no distinction between matter and spirit (i.e. the object-subject duality). At the risk of sounding facetious, anyone can dress themselves in a white robe and go before a camera or a live audience and repeat the words “Consciousness” and “Awareness” ad-infinitum and it would seem INDISTINGUISHABLE from the so called “satsangs” (a Sanskrit term that refers to a guru preaching to a gathering of spiritual seekers) of those fools who belong to the cult of neo-advaita. Although it may seem that in a couple of places in this treatise, that a form of Monistic Idealism is presented to the reader, the metaphysical view postulated here is, in fact, a form of neutral monism known as “decompositional dual-aspect monism” (“advaita”, in Sanskrit), and is a far more complete perspective than the immaterialism proposed by Idealism, and is the one realized and taught by the most enlightened sages throughout history, especially in the most “SPIRITUAL” piece of land on earth, Bhārata. Cf. “monism”. N.B. The Idealism referred to in the above definition (and in the body of this book) is metaphysical Idealism, not the ethical or political idealism often mentioned in public discourse (e.g. “I believe everyone in society ought to be given a basic income”). Therefore, to distinguish between sociological idealism and philosophical Idealism, the initial letter of the latter term is CAPITALIZED. monism: the view in metaphysics that reality (that is, Ultimate Reality) is a unified whole and that all existing things can be ascribed to or described by a single concept or system; the doctrine that mind and matter are formed from, or reducible to, the same ultimate substance or principle of being; any system of thought that seeks to deduce all the varied phenomena of both the physical and spiritual worlds from a single principle, specifically, the metaphysical doctrine that there is but one substance, either mind (idealism) or matter (materialism), or a substance that is neither mind nor matter, but is the substantial ground of both. Cf. “dualism”. To put it simply, whilst materialists/physicalists/naturalists believe that the ground of being is some kind of tangible form of matter (or a field of some sort), and idealists/theists/panpsychists consider some kind of mind(s) or consciousness(es) to be most fundamental, MONISTS understand that Ultimate Reality is simultaneously both the Subject and any possible object, and thus one, undivided whole (even though it may seem that objects are, in fact, divisible from a certain standpoint). The descriptive term favoured in the metaphysical framework proposed in this Holy Scripture is “Brahman”, a Sanskrit word meaning “expansion”, although similes such as “Sacchidānanda” (Eternal-Conscious-Peace), “The Tao”, and “The Monad”, are also satisfactory. Perhaps the oldest extant metaphysical system, Advaita Vedānta, originating in ancient Bhārata (India), which is the thesis promulgated in this treatise, “A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, is a decompositional dual-aspect monist schema, in which the mental and the physical are two (epistemic) aspects of an underlying (ontic) reality that itself is neither mental nor physical, but rather, psychophysically neutral. On such a view, the decomposition creates mutually-exclusive mental (subjective) and physical (objective) domains, both of which are necessary for a comprehensive metaphysical worldview. The mere fact that it is possible for Awareness to be conscious of Itself, implies that, by nature, Ultimate Reality is con-substantially BOTH subjective and objective, since it would not be possible for a subject to perceive itself unless the subject was also a self-reflective object. The term “transjective” has been coined by contemporary scholars to account for precisely this reality. This subject-object duality, and the notion of the transjective, is foundational to a complete understanding of existence/beingness. Therefore, it seems that the necessary-contingent dichotomy often discussed by philosophers in regards to ontology, is superfluous to the concept of monism, because on this view, BOTH the subjective and the objective realities are essentially one, necessary ontological Being(ness). In other words, because you are, fundamentally, Brahman, you are a necessary being and not contingent on any external force. This concept has been termed "necessitarianism" by contemporary philosophers, in contradistinction to "contingentarianism" - the view that at least some thing could have been otherwise different - and is intimately tied to the notions of causality and determinism in Chapters 08 and 11. Advaita Vedānta (that is, dual-aspect Monism) is the only metaphysical scheme that has complete explanatory power. Hypothetically, and somewhat tangentially, one might question thus: “If it is accurate to state that both the Subject of all subjects and all possible objects, are equally ‘Brahman’ (that is, Ultimate Truth), then surely that implies that a rock is equally valuable as a human being?”. That is correct purely on the Absolute platform. Here, in the transactional world of relativity, there is no such thing as equality, except within the conceptual sphere (such as in mathematics), as already demonstrated in more than a couple of places in this Holiest of Holy Books, “F.I.S.H”, especially in the chapter regarding the spiteful, pernicious ideology of feminism (Chapter 26). Cf. “advaita”, “dualism”, “Brahman/Parabrahman”, “Saguna Brahman”, “Nirguna Brahman”, “subject”, “object”, and “transjective”.
@@AbsolutePhilosophyHow do you arrive at the conclusion that christianity (and specifically the resurrection of christ) is true ? I mean : Do you think that you can prove god existence rationaly and then take a leap of faith from theism to christianity ? Maybe because you think that christian narrative makes sense (im talking about suffering).... Or : Are you the type that thinks can prove the resurrection as an historical event/fact ? Maybe using elements of history and antrophology . (No troll).
Best interview with Bernardo yet. Must feel so good to have had him enjoy it at least as much as you! Please push him on the NDE issue more. He takes psychedelic experiences seriously and uses them as data to support his view, but there are (scientifically vetted, with objectively verifiable details) NDE accounts that glaringly contradict what he says about meta cognitive abilities (or lack thereof) of mind at large. No one presses him on this.
How so? Idealism: Metaphysical Idealism is the view that the objective, phenomenal world is the product of an IDEATION of the mind, whether that be the individual, discrete mind of a personal subject, or otherwise that of a Universal Conscious Mind (often case, a Supreme Deity), or perhaps more plausibly, in the latter form of Idealism, Impersonal Universal Consciousness Itself (“Nirguna Brahman”, in Sanskrit).
The former variety of Idealism (that the external world is merely the product of an individual mind) seems to be a form of solipsism. The latter kind of Idealism is far more plausible, yet it reduces the objective world to nothing but a figment in the “Mind of God”. Thus, BOTH these forms of Idealism can be used to justify all kinds of immoral behaviour, on the premise that life is just a sort of dream in the mind of an individual human, or else in the consciousness of the Universal Mind, and therefore, any action that is deemed by society to be immoral takes place purely in the imagination (and of course, those who favour this philosophy rarely speak of how non-human animals fit into this metaphysical world-view, at least under the former kind of Idealism, subjective Idealism). Idealism (especially Monistic Idealism), is invariably the metaphysical position proffered by neo-advaita teachers outside of India (Bhārata), almost definitely due to the promulgation of the teachings in the West of Indian (so-called) “gurus” such as Mister Venkataraman Iyer (normally referred to by his assumed name, Ramana Maharshi). See the Glossary entry “neo-advaita”. This may explain why such (bogus) teachers use the terms “Consciousness” and/or “Awareness”, instead of the Vedantic Sanskrit word “Brahman”, since with “Brahman” there is ultimately no distinction between matter and spirit (i.e. the object-subject duality). At the risk of sounding facetious, anyone can dress themselves in a white robe and go before a camera or a live audience and repeat the words “Consciousness” and “Awareness” ad-infinitum and it would seem INDISTINGUISHABLE from the so called “satsangs” (a Sanskrit term that refers to a guru preaching to a gathering of spiritual seekers) of those fools who belong to the cult of neo-advaita. Although it may seem that in a couple of places in this treatise, that a form of Monistic Idealism is presented to the reader, the metaphysical view postulated here is, in fact, a form of neutral monism known as “decompositional dual-aspect monism” (“advaita”, in Sanskrit), and is a far more complete perspective than the immaterialism proposed by Idealism, and is the one realized and taught by the most enlightened sages throughout history, especially in the most “SPIRITUAL” piece of land on earth, Bhārata. Cf. “monism”. N.B. The Idealism referred to in the above definition (and in the body of this book) is metaphysical Idealism, not the ethical or political idealism often mentioned in public discourse (e.g. “I believe everyone in society ought to be given a basic income”). Therefore, to distinguish between sociological idealism and philosophical Idealism, the initial letter of the latter term is CAPITALIZED.
Both thinkers challenge the mainstream physicalist, reductionist, and materialist accounts of the world. While their alternative worldview is not fully developed and likely contains errors, I believe they are moving in a more promising direction than the mainstream narrative. From what I understand, you follow the Advaita Vedanta philosophy. Personally, I lean toward the anthroposophical worldview. So I don’t entirely agree with everything they propose, including their metaethics. That said, I appreciate their efforts to shift the mainstream discourse in a more constructive direction. ✌️
NIce to see the title has been changed! This is a wonderful discussion. Have watched several times. It’s a wonderful moment when Bernardo talks about his concession to time and space, as opposed to coming from eternity. This has been interpreted in Tao, Vedanta, Buddhism etc.
I was nine when the lights came on. I was swallowed by an overwhelming feeling of being "me" I don't remember if it was days or weeks, but for a while I was hyper aware of my breathing and movements and wanted desperately to escape from my body. It was surreal.
I would listen to these two talk for 3 hours every day. What a gift this conversation is. I will surely listen to this entire thing again in a few months. PS - I respect the clickbaity title ;)
I also have the bug (as referenced about 1:44) I cannot thank you enough for this conversation and all of the other conversations which are the backdrop of my every day and resonate in a way that only someone who as you say ‘has the bug’ can understand. Bernardo what you have said about the Daemon has helped me so much in having some level of understanding about what is happening to/in me, it has given me relief
This was the most interesting and philosophically profound Kastrup conversation I’ve listened to. Very adroitly navigated, and pertinent questions eliciting helpful elucidations, especially on the issue of the possibility of mind-at-large being metacognitive (Kastrup’s previous statements over the years that mind-at-large doesn’t possess metacognition (of some sort) is an element of his idealism that I haven’t bought into)
Man, just when I thought I had a grip on Bernardo’s philosophy, he sits down with Nathan and now I know I will have to spend hours and hours to try and figure out what these two are on about!
It sounded to me like Bernardo held firm to the idea that Mind at Large is *not* meta-cognitive…except insofar as evolutionarily advanced dissociated alters like us form within It. At least that’s how he sounded near the end of this long conversation, so maybe I already forgot the admission claimed in the title, in which case he contradicted himself later.
He didn't. He stated that mind at large, in its eternal state beyond the dashboard, is indeed metaconscious. Kastrup speaks _as if_ it is not metaconscious because he adopts the reality of spacetime language for purposes of argument. But the perspective of mind at large is the privileged perspective. That's why it is _absolutely_ true to say mind at large is metaconscious, but from our temporally bound perspective it is _relatively_ true to say it is not metaconscious _now_ . This links to our discussion of Parmenides. There seems to be confusion on this point so I might do a video explaining what the core points were.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy I admit this was confusing and still is for me. Towards the end he explained that dissociative minds (if that exists at all..) have metaconsciousness which, by feedback to the 'source', gives her metaconsciousness.. So, my understanding is that meta is not a build-in function of MaL but is acquired during 'evolution'? Am I missing something?
@@James-ll3jb Good question. I'm familiar with the term 'metacognition, which Kastrup has used on many occation, and how metacognition relates sentient awareness. In that relation metacognition is a synonym for consciousness, and "metaconscious" sounds like pleonastic "metametacognition". If some other meaning is intended, I'd also like to hear what exactly.
Thanks again Nathan! I love the mutual level of respect you two have for each other, and I think its a really interesting dynamic that you both seem to agree on the idea at large (idealism) but have contentions with how this is reasoned and expressed. It reminds me of the appearance and the thing in itself, where the core idea(lism) is the thing in itself but how it manifests in your heads is what it looks like from the point of view of your own learnings. Also, most surprising fact is that you are 45! Haha, looking forward to more content :)
I have been pondering these questions for a lifetime. Happening upon Bernardo a few years ago has been life changing for me. I have one question still - does the universe care at all or is it simply a blind indifferent.unfolding of the unmanifest into the manifest? I wonder whether all-encompassing love could be an archetypal drive of the universe? This would be so much more 'intelligent' than our measly evolutionary achievement of metacognition. Thank you Nathan for pushing these questions with Bernardo. Thank you Bernardo for your clear, insightful, sincere intellect. What a gift this discussion is for Xmas day Granny from NZ
I’m so glad you made this comment as this is exactly what I have been pondering about and I asked something similar in a comment to the previous video. I find it strange that the very topic and concept of (unconditional) love was only mentioned once in a casual way in this long conversation. It seems to me that these discussions seriously lack female perspectives and tend to stay in a very cerebral masculine kind of ‘intellectual masturbation’ lacking other angles of the human experience pondering these questions - and I am saying this as a man 😅 As I mentioned I asked in my comment to the previous video about earlier talks in videos with Rupert Spira and BK where Rupert Spira always holds on to the notion that Consciousness in essence IS love and BK at some point seemed to not want to contradict Rupert but no one has pressed BK on this and his stands that M@L is instinctive which I believe would be a contradiction. Also it bothers me that BK and others interviewing him most often seem so narrow minded about the subject ‘the problem of evil’. I would love for someone (other than me) to suggest to BK a lot of past teachings like the late Danish mystic Martinus where the problem of evil is ‘easily’ understood in the model of a karmic system - where life on earth is one of many ‘schools’ to learn and grow and become more aware of love and cooporation through the experiences of suffering. To get back to the source of Love that all of this sprung from originally (the story of Eden etc. as a metaphor). “Evil” in this way would be merely a human morality judgement from a very limited perspective. Anyway I think it’s peculiar that all encompassing unconditional Love is almost entirely absent from these discussions. I guess BK has his reasons as he explained about sticking to his rigorous line of arguing. I think we need to incorporate Love as I think this interviewer kind of suggested to make all of this more salient generally more helpful to the broader public and it’s growing struggles of meaning crisis.
Thanks for your encouragement with this question. I guess I am looking for hard evidence/experience that all encompassing love is fundamental or archetypal and I am not just wanting it to be that way to comfort myself. I have had glimpses in certain dream states not dissimilar to what Bernardo described as 'the gift' in his psychedelic experiences but like him I am wary of imagination/ self deception/ / wishful thinking/ other explanations. If it is the case all encompassing unconditional instinctual love is archetypal I assume it would also be all knowing and all peaceful. Metacognition would be neither here nor there. I really want to get to grips with what 'The Blob' is and aware that time is running out. Love Bernardo. Hope there may be more conversations with Nathan and Bernardo. Granny from NZ
@@JaneCotter-o8l - Well I am totally with you on that. I would really like to know too preferably through some kind of evidence/proof. Not to be disrespectful or a cynic but I guess we could tell ourselves that we will know soon enough after this time around dissociating 😉 But I grant you it would feel much more settling to know and understand now. Also it might accelerate positive human development if possible. I want that too.
@AbsolutePhilosophy I appreciate your rigor, your erudition, and your bringing to bear a first rate philosophical education. Your critiques and questions were excellent and they provided the space for what is the most comprehensive elucidation of Bernardo’s thought on UA-cam! So many of his videos cover the same (largely introductory) ground. @BernardoKastrup, I wholeheartedly encourage you to engage with such hosts (rare though they may be) more often! It’s great to hear you spread your wings a bit more. Lastly, @AbsolutePhilosophy, I’d love to see you speak with Matthew @Footnotes2Plato. He’s largely known for his expertise in Process Philosophy and I find him humble, insightful, and smart. Well done, you’ve certainly earned my sub!
Matt recently did an episode of ‘Theories of Everything’.. He has chatted with Bernardo as well. Links below. ua-cam.com/video/DeTm4fSXpbM/v-deo.htmlsi=hbCicFhbbUV1SFYf ua-cam.com/video/s7I5j2cteFQ/v-deo.htmlsi=_fGYhnT6uX8lBDw5
I appreciate you pushing into Bernardos ideas. I toss around a lot of ideas, even though the depths go beyond what I have properly thought through, I like to listen to the ideas tested at depth. I tend toward an adherence to the law of logic, but I also recognize that they eventually break down. For instance the infinite potential preceded the actual, but what 'caused' the infinite potential to break symmetry for the actual to arise? It seems like something only a mind could do, but it also seems like any idea of what a mind is, would be contained in the infinite potential. So I am not sure the intuitionist is the best approach for the actual reality but I am also not sure the laws of logic can lead us to the promised land either.
Perhaps the answer lies in embracing the tension between logic and intuition as a key to navigating between the potential and the real, without demanding a definitive resolution. After all, the "promised land" may be more of a horizon than a final destination...
Man I watch these because all philosophies need to be challenged, but these thumbnails are shameful. Have some integrity, don't make it look like you "got 'em!" that's gotcha journalism. But your interviews are quite cordial and nuanced otherwise, keep up the good work!
@justinamos9223 not if you have integrity. Just ask Randy of Tegrity farms. Tbh I wrestle with this in my own videos critiquing kastrup and sapolsky, I just use a picture of their book in my thumbnail, but I know I'd get more views if I made a more controversial titles and imagery.
I clicked it for the thumbnail and found Bernardo to be so gracious and open, helped me understand the scope of where he is coming from better. Only slightly glad for the thumbnail for that haha. But I agree with you!
See, Martin is the reason I have just excepted those type of thumbnails. It reaches people that would not watch the video otherwise, spreading good content (and good YTers). Otherwise, it would just be crappy content that uses these marketing techniques. And I agree, I initially thought that YTers should rise above the need to employ clickbait, but as I realized the benefits of it, and that theres a level of it that I find acceptable (as well as a level I find repulsive which is usually a claim that is not at all demonstrated in the video) I’ve become much more comfortable with it.
I am not really concerned about what any particular person BELIEVES. You may believe that there is an old man with a white beard perched in the clouds, that the Ultimate Reality is a young blackish-blue Indian guy, that the universe is eternal, that Mother Mary was a certifiable virgin, or that gross physical matter is the foundation of existence. The ONLY thing that really matters is your meta-ethics, not your meta-physics. Do you consider any form of non-monarchical government (such as democracy or socialism) to be beneficial? Do you unnecessarily destroy the lives of poor, innocent animals and gorge on their bloody carcasses? Do you believe homosexuality and transvestism are moral? Do you consider feminist ideology to be righteous? If so, then you are objectively immoral, and your so-called "enlightened/awakened" state is immaterial, since it does not benefit society in any way.
@@FilipinaVegana Being a monarchist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist vegan who follows Advaita Vedanta is a bizarre combination of worldviews. You will find few people to be in complete agreement with you.
@@FilipinaVegana Being a monarchist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist vegan who follows Advaita Vedanta is a bizarre combination of worldviews. You will find few people to be in complete agreement with you.
Our mind is the one that tries to divide things into "before" and "after", or "cause" and "effect", because that's how we can think. Ultimately, I think the important thing is not so much to find a definitive answer, but to keep questioning and exploring. Perhaps the "meaning" of it all is exactly this: to live in doubt and discovery, without waiting for all the pieces to fit perfectly.
I think the mind notes regularities e.g. "before/after", "cause/effect", and the division within these dichotomies exist as apprehended, not created. I wish Kastrup and the academic dude here would honestly confront these vital issues directly.❤ It's nice to think we will go on doubting and exploring 'ad infinitum', as no doubt we will, even AFTER defibitive answers to questions of ultimate meaning are reached!
I think you were partially correct. Philosophy and arguments must coher with REALITY in general and facts in particular. Cohering with sensations and feelings is the WORST metric, that's what caused the rise of Panpsychism, Idealism, and other philosophical chimeras. The statements "It feels correct", "It's unsatisfactory", "How it's like to be a ..." are some examples of a bankrupt epistemology.
I feel like there were a couple of points where I feel like you were just one comment away from refuting a view Bernardo has but instead the conversation got sidelined in a direction I didn't see the relevance in. Like, Kastrup seems to admit of these "archetypes" as having a role akin to Platonic Forms, so meta-cognition needs to be one such principle. But then isn't mind-at-large meta-conscious simply in virtue of this and not in virtue of it having dissociated states that are meta-cognitive? I feel like you tried to make this point but didn't press it hard or express it clearly enough. Also related to meta-cognition I feel like Bernardo's view that it's somehow reducible to purely simple phenomenal states (for lack of a better term) has a rather glaring flaw. If meta-cognition is understood as "representing at a higher level" how can it be reduced to things which are purely going on at the lower level? In that way a reductive explanation seems impossible, and the presence of some purpose (like fitness for survival) is irrelevant. Phillip Goff said it to him once how this is the same reasoning physicalists use to render all mental phenomena explicable (they exist because it is useful for survival), and I agree. Really all it comes down to is that mind-at-large needs to be at least meta-conscious for our meta-consciousness to be explicable, so it just isn't a superfluous posit like Bernardo seems to think. As far as the concerns about evolution and inheritance of traits go, I think that Bernardo basically can't offer a good explanation because he lacks an explanation of dissociation in mind-at-large in general. His reasoning ends up being that there is a metaphysical process isomorphic to reproduction where dissociated states produce more dissociated states, which of course is just inferring its existence as a necessary condition of his thesis about representation of alters but not really rendering the process intelligible. The analogy to whirlpools isn't really helpful either since presumably the principles of fluid mechanics which explain whirlpools don't have much to do with mind-at-large, which is a simple mental substance and not a body of water. There's potentially another issue of how two alters generating another one can be understood in mind-at-large as an eternal "space" where, unlike the sensible world, we cannot say that at one point there is a certain number of alters around and then at another there's more that have been born. But to be fair this is an issue that exists in general (not just for reproduction) and maybe has a similar equivalent for any idealist theory where time is just a feature of sense-experience. Lastly I'll just reply to some of the comments on pluralism and at least what I think Leibniz would say (since the comment read was mine). It is true that something like the interaction problem would exist if any contents the minds had depended on being impressed from "the outside." But if one has an idea like the one of preordained harmony then this isn't necessary. God would be the one imbuing all the monads with the "scripts" which give their unique essence (and in it the way everything else is represented), knowledge God has in virtue of knowing the nature of every possible world, and then actualize them through a kind of emmanatory process. The multiplicity is a virtue and not a vice if one considers being, and by extension plenitude (in the world), as a mark of goodness or beauty as does Leibniz. Simply put, the world is rendered more rich by having more beings in it which don't compromise its harmonious unity. So it's by no means a mere complication that's being called for. And this relevance of teleology might actually have a barring in some of these debates. Leibniz can't explain reproduction (on a metaphysical level) through monads interacting, since they in general don't. But he can say that God selected a world where reproduction works in such a way because it's better than some other. Of course, the way that the mechanism of reproduction is obscure for Kastrup the "calculus of goodness" is here for Leibniz. But I think the latter is still better because a blank teleological explanation can still be understood as an explanation whereas something purely mechanical (which sounds like what Kastrup is going for pretty intentionally) is just obscure/occult.
I've been delving into absolute idealism which is very congruous with phenomena like savant syndrome. Absolute idealists would say that logic and reason are immanent from the source as opposed to qualities that are arrived at or stumbled upon. This view is also congruent with Platonic realism where this reality is only a shadow of a more complete one. So metacognition isn't necessarily something that the mind of nature discovers through us, but rather, it is already an inherent capacity that finds expression in humans; and the same goes for states of confusion and autopilot. Mind at Large already knows that the awareness of awareness, or sapiens sapiens, is possible.
2 lines of questioning I am wondering about: What is really the difference between something the mind of nature discovers and an inherent capacity? (thinking metaphysically) Under both forms of idealism, isn't the reduction base of reality ONLY the mind of nature? If there is something that the mind of nature can discover, doesn't that make it an inherent capacity? I'm not sure if Kastrup would disagree with this point, along his "anything that can exist will/does exist" line of thought. 2nd completely unrelated question that your comment prompted: Does mind at large know THAT awareness of awareness is possible, or does it simply know the awareness of awareness? Actually I guess this is just another way of asking absolute or analytic idealism maybe. Hmm
If we imagine all the tools in a workshop as words and ourselves as the one who crafts, then we can see we are a witness, an observer of our creativity, one who produces within uncertainty. Something like that.
1:07:12 ..don't say that! I read BKs books in a somewhat weird order (not chronological) and ..in retrospect, it feels like a synchronistic choreography, it was the RIGHT order for ME it seems! Started off with the hardcore science-y / logical stuff, and 'Meaning in Absurdity' more towards the end and 'More Than Allegory' was my last book.. ..and it hit DEEP! That one stirred up some dust for sure. Even after a severe crisis years back, that opened me up to ..many things, I still consider myself a very "head heavy" person for better or worse, so allowing myself to entertain and explore the edges by following along these books was a challenge, yet excitingly liberating! And very different than spiritual literature.. So should there be the urge to sally forth in this direction again, please do so (if possible). I recommend these books to anybody, but, as he wrote, some (lucky) few don't need them, but many many do I'm convinced. It's nice to imagine that BK would somehow read this, but that probably won't be the case, anyway, I felt the need to express or critique that statement / judgement. Cheers.
When you mention the relation between facism and materialism it reminded me a lot to Pius XI’s encyclical called Quadragesimo Anno. The project of that encyclical is precisely to attach both extremes of socialism and liberalism as consecuences of a materialistic perspective. All written in 1931
I wonder if Bernado would endorse 'following the evidence wherever it leads' to politics and history (I understand he couldn't afford to do that himself)
Real illumination for Christmas Eve- thanks for clearing the expression about we being monkeys around a rock - today i get it - but gods looking out through our eyes- wow❤
Bernardo said that the Universe most likely isn't metacognitive because there can't be universe-wide closed cognitive re-entrant loops that are usually associated with metacognition and metarepresentation, but I think you only come to this conclusion if you look from within the universe, if you're a dissociation inside the universe and you observe it. Then you will see classically looking things that aren't causally connected, from your point of view. The same can be said about entanglement - you can't send information through entangled particles, but that's only if you're already in the environment where the entangled particles live - ie, inside the universe. But the universe as a whole, as a "quantum object", must be viewed holistically - as a whole, not as parts. In this sense, even if the universe is expanding and parts of it are causally disconnected (because information would need to travel faster than the speed of light to connect them), from its first-person experience it is still a whole. So I think it can still be metacognitive. I also don't think it needs to be put under the pressures of evolution to be metacognitive - it could be from the get-go (always was metacognitive) and only its dissociations evolve to re-discover the metacognition that was always there in Mind-at-Large (it would be like the dissociations re-discovering who they really are).
Bravo!!!!! Your retort "because it's an egg doesn't mean it gives a chicken" to his a...olish comment about cannons was very british and on-target. I would have laughed loudly first, then said "cannons, really?", and then given your retort. Bernie thinks anything he is capable of imaginning must be true, because he is great.
I really like the channel! The question posed around 43 was great I have an more direct challenge . According to Kastrup the nervous systemic is a projection of our experiences on the "screen of perception". Suppose that I take a microelectrode and stimulate a peripheral sensory nerve in my leg. That leads to some experience, a sensation. It is a fact that (barring technical details) I will get the same sensation regardless of (i) where along the nerve I apply the stimulus, (ii) what metal the electrode is made of, or (iii) what shape the electrode has. Since there is only one experience how does the screen of perception "know" which one of these physical realities to "project" ? Moreover, what is the electrode a projection of before the experience starts?
wait...if we are part and parcel (although dissociated) of mind at large and we are meta cognitive doesn't that mean that mind at large is necessarily also meta-cognitive (through us?)... as long as mind at large is not dissociated from us. Wasn't this the principal point of Jung's Answer to Job? Also on the recursive application of archetypes... i believe that Jung also believed that the archetypes were subject to some modification as they interact with the subjects ... i think i remember him discussing about how archetypes were gradually changing over time. So there is some evolution happening in the archetypes.
Hi Nathan. At some point in this discussion you mention that you think "truth is the ultimate thought, goodness is the ultimate act, and beauty is the ultimate feeling". I'm very interested in exploring this idea. Do you have any recommendations where I can read more about this?
I didn't lift that from anywhere specific, but there is a long tradition in taking values to be the ultimate constituents of reality, dating back to Plato. The true, the good, and the beautiful often being seen to have special status. But it is FH Bradley that sees truth as being what our thought attempts to become as we comprehend reality "in the whole". And he also breaks with Hegel by thinking that feeling is something other than thought, and reality includes feeling. So I suggest reading Bradley, and if you want to you can become a member of the channel because I'm going through Bradley's great metaphysical work "Appearance and Reality" in members only videos, both reading and then explaining it. (Lots more on that is planned).
@Soundsofanetwork Yes and yes. Although I keep they philosophical language and argument distinct from religious language as much as possible, and I leave the question of whether the Absolute is God independent of metaphysics.
I still think Bernardo and others interested in this topic should give them selves a chance to familiarize themselves with the teachings of the late Danish mystic Martinus. Explained here: ua-cam.com/video/s6FVFb3m8so/v-deo.htmlsi=9zYlxkAvzfr9dJeT
Well jokes aside, it would be very hard to prove otherwise. Cats are mamalian animals just like us, their brain structure and function are of the same blueprint as us. If we grant ourselves meta/access-consciousness, then our default assumption about cats' cognition should be the same, and NOT the other way around.
While I like Nathan's framing from the intro., you are getting into dodgy territory when you start talking about what _you_ *_want_* God to Be. Like you have a choice in the matter? The beginning of all genuine philosophy is humility before The Absolute. If you don't have that then there's not going to be a lot of good coming from your fanciful ideas. What you _could_ do is start with the Absolute as the _actual_ Absolute, admit It is Unknowable, and then work downwards, which means, as in mathematical Set Theory, you are humble and abandon all pretensions to say anything about God (or even "the universe"), but you can reflect attributes that could be universals on existence at lower grades of the spirit. Then you can say useful things about normal daily practicalities like how we treat each other, macroeconomic justice, the funding in sciences, the banal evils of neoliberalism, the needlessness of war - you know, the moral and spiritual dimensions that matter a heck of a lot and justify giving public university philosophers a decent salaried job.
Really Nobel and intelligent and respectful decent contrary and agreement dialogue - thank you - we are in the spiral becoming ordering principle in continuous complexity evolution ……Schrödinger said that our chromosomes are more a quasicrystal than a periodic that though beautiful repeats the same pattern as a quasi crystal exhibits ordered parts but also with freedom of expression but also respects the golden rato- but for ever new arrangements of complexity compared to masterpiece of embroidery to a tapestry of Raphael which shows no dull repetition . Merry christmas - so appreciate your respect and decency to each other- not like some others who seem to come on to show their ego and how much they know. We love Bernardo & Nathan
The thought experiment of the previous comment about peripheral nerve stimulation provides an objective means for determining whether conscious experiences or the physical world is more fundamental. What the experiment shows is taking the physical or mental as fundamental is not equally workable, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two. Each experience can arise from a huge variety of different molecular configurations of the brain and therefore the experiences simply cannot be the determinants of what the physical world is. The more fundamental level is obviously the one with the higher information content. This forces (at least Kastrup's version of) idealism to invent ever more arbitrary and bizarre things like experiences that we do not know we are having and the like.
@@tiborkoos188 It’s more subtle that that. The brain and its processes are discrete, or digital. The perceptions, memories and ideas in the mind are continuous. We extract patterns from the information and join the dots. As Quine wrote, the continuous objects of perception and the continuum of real numbers are “convenient myths” which fill out discrete reality but contain it as scattered fragments. Since the cardinality of the continuum is higher than that of the natural numbers, the ideas in the mind may be considered as infinitely more complex than the stimuli in the external world.
@@richardatkinson4710 HI RIchard, Are you the Atkinson I know ? As for the comment. My first reaction was that if the ides of the mind are states of the brain than the total information content would be, at the maximum, equal to the integral of the p*log2(p) over the (continuous) probability distribution density over all degrees of freedom of all particles while for the world it would the same for all particles of the world, which of course would mu much larger. But then I realized that you may be right because the information content of the "world" for a human observed is limited by sensory resolution and the collection of distinct inputs (sensory experiences). This is quite interesting actually. Maybe what it means is that we can always create more through imagination then what we will ever perceive ? Cheers!
@@goran586 The world "experience" refers to the things that I find in my my subjective internal landscape (sounds, sights, feelings in my body, thoughts, emotions) when I use introspection to examine what's happening in my mind. Too say that I have an experience that I don;t know that I am having would obviously mean that I would not be able to find this "experience" within my inner world by introspection. But then how can I be possibly "experiencing" it ? He confuses unconscious processes of the brain with experiences. The very point of an experience is that I am conscious of it. He is trying to desperately protect his incoherent story by inventing nonsensical and arbitrary definitions like experiences that we are not experiencing. I can easly demonstrate why his idea is incoherent. Since these activities are not experienced by me - I cannot locate them in my mind, cannot identify or describe them, cannot even say WHEN they are happening - then what basis do we have for saying that these are "experiences" ? Why not unconscious brain processes ? What's more, Kastrup wants to argue that on the one hand, brain activity is not the cause of experience, but on the other, that brain activity proves that there is an "experience". So which one is it ? His whole story is completely incoherent.
BK’s analytic idealism is a great aspiration. There are a few things I think he gets wrong. I just listened to his use of the example of Conway’s Game of Life, where he seems to think the two rules of the Game generate great complexity. I think the Game is a really important (even unique) example for demonstrating the potential of Zuse’s “Calculating Space” (the universe as a cellular automaton). But the complexity has to be put in. A sole live cell (or bit) disappears in the first “generation”, after which nothing happens. By contrast, Paul Rendell’s fully complete universal Turing machine starts with several million live cells, each one exactly placed in a huge field of dead cells. This is an extremely exciting invention/discovery, but there’s no easy route there from any simpler pattern.
Fine tuning: the problem here is the arbitrary assumption of time arrow from bing bang to now. Leave this conservative assumption and think of big bang as result of the conscious now backwards. Fine tuning solved. This is first step. Now go one step further and give up causality all together. Big bang is happening now, the only now there is. Fine tuning is red herring.
I'm my opinion, yes he does at the level of eternity, which, since time is not ultimately real, means M@L is metacognitive, especially if this level of speaking concerns absolute truths, which Kastrup seems to admit. But concerns were raised by Kastrup that the claim should only be presented within the context of the discussion, not in the title. So I changed it. Was it click bait? Yes and no. I thought it was the most interesting aspect of the discussion, so the most likely to get a click. But it was not misrepresentation.
I don't seem to see a significant difference between what Castrup proposes and any theoretical subtrate that gives rise to fundamental physics, like String Theory.
I think BK is right to discuss Wigner’s “Unreasonable Effectiveness…” paper when trying to include mathematics in his metaphysics. But my own view is that Wigner’s view of mathematics as a miraculous windfall for scientists is quite wrong. The laws of physics - as Exner taught, and as his student Schrödinger believed all his life, are all statistical. Any statistical pattern can be approximated to any degree of accuracy by a range of analytic functions. Weinberg suggested as much in his “Dreams of a Final Theory”, I think (all physical laws may be approximate).
"Any smart Alec and their friend" prefer Science instead of Philosophy, because Science CAN show it works in REALITY. Philosophy, especially Metaphysics is ALL about guesswork fueled or fed with ignorance about the facts of the matter.
Kastrup actually made me realise that I’m an idealist and that I’m far from alone in that, so I’m forever in his debt. However, the more I’ve contemplated idealism the more problems I see with Kastrup’s “analytic” version. The main problem I have with it, is that if everything is “experience”, it does not mean that every experience has to belong to a corresponding “experiencer”. I feel this is a neat trick to let AI correspond on a 1 to 1 basis with physicalist scientific explanations, and to avoid the black hole of solipsism, but it stretched my credulity to the limit. Are we supposed to really believe that every thing observed apart from living organisms belongs to one singular “mind at large” that somehow holds the entire universe together at once? It honestly just seems absurd. To me it seems much more likely that many things are “just observed”, they are mere representation, and they do not have their own corresponding inner existing consciousness, of any kind. Think of a dream. It would be very strange to claim that a character that you imagined in your dream had their own inner life, that they effectively are born, live, and die within the confines of your short dream.
This is literally one of the first things covered in his dissertation/his main paper on analytic idealism. The relationship between subject and object. It also comes up in the last interview he did on this channel.
@ he wouldn’t be much of a philosopher if he hadn’t covered it. I do have respect for him for actually putting forward a positive metaphysical explanation and backing it, it’s much more than most theorists are willing to do, and I wish more would act with this conviction.
'many things are “just observed”, they are mere representation' - representation of what? If you believe there are objects that don't correspond to any mind, you are not an Idealist. (of course if you choose not to be an idealist, that's okay)
@ I believe that the base of all reality is experience. That is, that “physical” objects only exists as experiences. A conscience being can be regarded as a centre of experience, and reality is a tapestry where many such centres overlap. Our dreams and imagination are places where our experience doesn’t need to overlap with others, which is why they are far more flexible, whereas reality is a shared experience built up by millions of minds over millions of years. I don’t believe that each and every physical object in the universe is somehow held together by a singular “mind at large” though. In fact it can be seriously questioned whether the cosmos actually exists at all; the only thing we can really say is that it appears to exists from our perspective. Maybe that’s a version of idealism or maybe not, as I don’t care for labels.
@@tommoody728 So you believe in overlapping experiences between different people i.e. if you can see a tree, I will also be able to see a tree in the same location. But you don't believe those overlapping experiences are grounded in anything, neither a Universal Mind nor a physical world. Idk, that seems like a worldview that doesn't explain anything.
Round about 44mins BK says that the world - the ideal or mental world - calculates what comes next (or what to do next). I think that’s wrong. Mathematicians choose the model to fit the data, but the data are just statistics.
1:03:00 So Kastrup cannot run an argument without affirming what he aims to deny? Brilliant! This is a paradigmatic case of self-refutation. If anything he admitted his position is inconsistent.
@@anteodedi8937 @Sam-hh3ry πριν από 1 ώρα What a dumb and incorrect takeaway. the limits of language and human cognition hold for literally all attempts at explaining the world.
@@masticloxpoker1006I agree with Kastrup characterization of mind at large as non-higher ordering, non-meta-consciousness monism, what Schopenhauer call the (entailing) eye of nature, which does infinitely extrapolate as primary coherence, appearing to our meta-conscious reporting as developmental, thee primacy of first and ultimate, ‘as if’ spontaneous causation, etc.
I’ve never encountered a contemporary philosopher who has the breadth of knowledge that Kastrup does across multiple domains (e.g. physics, psychoanalysis, computer science, etc.). Most academics are restricted to their silos of expertise, and we need more of these cross-disciplinary intellectuals.
I’d put Iain McGilchrist in the same category, and they have recently had a conversation together.
Wake up babe, new Bernardo camera angle just dropped.
HAHAHA
😂😂😂
😂
New drip tooo ayye.😈💯XD
This is by far the most philosophical discussion with Kastrup i have seen, well done to the host for leading such a deep discussion! It's even way beyond Kastrup's doctoral dissertation video available online. I have not read his thesis, so i cannot say if this level was already there, or is it acquired over the years. But this video was one of my favorites, the one i would recommend anyone to watch after they have the basics covered.
Well done the pair of you...a debate done with love.
Superficially, Bernardo Kastrup SEEMS to be promulgating the most ancient spiritual teaching of Advaita Vedanta (as found in the Upanishadic texts of India) but due to reasons I won't go into at length here, his understanding is rather flawed.
If one carefully listens to any of his monologues or interview videos, it is obvious (at least it is obvious to those who are truly enlightened) that he regularly confuses and conflates discrete consciousness (as emerging from the neural networks of animals) and UNIVERSAL Consciousness (which is the all-pervasive, eternal ground of all being, more appositely termed "The Tao", "Brahman" or "Infinite Awareness").
He also believes in (limited) freedom of will, which is, of course, ludicrous, and his understanding of suffering is truly infantile, which is unfortunate, since the eradication of suffering is the goal of life.
In order to PROPERLY understand the distinction between the two aforementioned categories of consciousness, you are welcome to email me for a copy of "A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity", which are the most authoritative and accurate precepts extant. My address is on my UA-cam homepage.
However, my main criticism of Kastrup is not with his metaphysics, it is, rather, his METAETHICS. He is, objectively speaking, afflicted with a demonic mentality, as demonstrated with his support of all things contrary to Dharma (the law, and societal duties), such as egalitarianism, feminism, homosexuality, and socialism.
In a recent interview, for example, Bernie displayed abject ignorance when discussing the topic of animal consumption. Hopefully, he will one day realize how incredibly hypocritical he is in this regard, and become a compassionate VEGAN. 🌱
After all, to criticize Bernardo for his teachings being only, let's say, ninety percent accurate, would be silly, since, compared with almost every other person who has ever lived, his philosophical understanding is fairly sound. Yet, what is the point of being even TOTALLY correct about metaphysics, when one's metaethics and normative ethics is fundamentally flawed?
Furthermore, Bernado has admitted that he has struggled with mental health issues for several decades. I would suggest he flee to the loving arms of an ACTUAL spiritual master in order to learn Dharma (as well, of course, correct his flawed metaphysics).
Peace!
P.S. It seems Bernie Boy has BLOCKED at least one of my UA-cam accounts, so if you are reading this, you are indeed fortunate. ;)
@@FilipinaVegana I think it's you who have a flawed understanding of what kastrup actually says, because he and Rupert Spira have done a deep dive comparison of their views, and they turned out to be identical.
@@FilipinaVegana Being a monarchist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist vegan who follows Advaita Vedanta is a bizarre combination of worldviews. You will find few people to be in complete agreement with you.
@@FilipinaVegana Bernardo's model is not even close to Advaita. Also it is a real pity that these ancient Knowledges (not only Advaita but all including non-dual ones) are very rarely mentioned and elaborated upon in all these consciousness interviews.
I'm always impressed with Bernado's adaptability and compassion in his guest apperances. He truly is a shining light of our time.
I really hope and pray the two continue a conversation because you’re headed in a direction we really need to go to bring about a real paradigm shift for humanity. It needs to go deep and have a firm foundation so it sinks into the culture as a whole. The analytic approach is in my view absolutely necessary.
Speaking slower and more clearly, like Bernardo does intentionally, is a big plus to being able to understand the arguments and connections between ideas.
As a frequent listener to discussions like these, I would highly recommend that other idealists try this strategy and approach; it is very helpful, in many ways.
Good advice. I'll bear that in mind!
Idealism:
Metaphysical Idealism is the view that the objective, phenomenal world is the product of an IDEATION of the mind, whether that be the individual, discrete mind of a personal subject, or otherwise that of a Universal Conscious Mind (often case, a Supreme Deity), or perhaps more plausibly, in the latter form of Idealism, Impersonal Universal Consciousness Itself (“Nirguna Brahman”, in Sanskrit).
The former variety of Idealism (that the external world is merely the product of an individual mind) seems to be a form of solipsism.
The latter kind of Idealism is far more plausible, yet it reduces the objective world to nothing but a figment in the “Mind of God”.
Thus, BOTH these forms of Idealism can be used to justify all kinds of immoral behaviour, on the premise that life is just a sort of dream in the mind of an individual human, or else in the consciousness of the Universal Mind, and therefore, any action that is deemed by society to be immoral takes place purely in the imagination (and of course, those who favour this philosophy rarely speak of how non-human animals fit into this metaphysical world-view, at least under the former kind of Idealism, subjective Idealism).
Idealism (especially Monistic Idealism), is invariably the metaphysical position proffered by neo-advaita teachers outside of India (Bhārata), almost definitely due to the promulgation of the teachings in the West of Indian (so-called) “gurus” such as Mister Venkataraman Iyer (normally referred to by his assumed name, Ramana Maharshi). See the Glossary entry “neo-advaita”.
This may explain why such (bogus) teachers use the terms “Consciousness” and/or “Awareness”, instead of the Vedantic Sanskrit word “Brahman”, since with “Brahman” there is ultimately no distinction between matter and spirit (i.e. the object-subject duality).
At the risk of sounding facetious, anyone can dress themselves in a white robe and go before a camera or a live audience and repeat the words “Consciousness” and “Awareness” ad-infinitum and it would seem INDISTINGUISHABLE from the so called “satsangs” (a Sanskrit term that refers to a guru preaching to a gathering of spiritual seekers) of those fools who belong to the cult of neo-advaita.
Although it may seem that in a couple of places in this treatise, that a form of Monistic Idealism is presented to the reader, the metaphysical view postulated here is, in fact, a form of neutral monism known as “decompositional dual-aspect monism” (“advaita”, in Sanskrit), and is a far more complete perspective than the immaterialism proposed by Idealism, and is the one realized and taught by the most enlightened sages throughout history, especially in the most “SPIRITUAL” piece of land on earth, Bhārata. Cf. “monism”.
N.B. The Idealism referred to in the above definition (and in the body of this book) is metaphysical Idealism, not the ethical or political idealism often mentioned in public discourse (e.g. “I believe everyone in society ought to be given a basic income”).
Therefore, to distinguish between sociological idealism and philosophical Idealism, the initial letter of the latter term is CAPITALIZED.
monism:
the view in metaphysics that reality (that is, Ultimate Reality) is a unified whole and that all existing things can be ascribed to or described by a single concept or system; the doctrine that mind and matter are formed from, or reducible to, the same ultimate substance or principle of being; any system of thought that seeks to deduce all the varied phenomena of both the physical and spiritual worlds from a single principle, specifically, the metaphysical doctrine that there is but one substance, either mind (idealism) or matter (materialism), or a substance that is neither mind nor matter, but is the substantial ground of both. Cf. “dualism”.
To put it simply, whilst materialists/physicalists/naturalists believe that the ground of being is some kind of tangible form of matter (or a field of some sort), and idealists/theists/panpsychists consider some kind of mind(s) or consciousness(es) to be most fundamental, MONISTS understand that Ultimate Reality is simultaneously both the Subject and any possible object, and thus one, undivided whole (even though it may seem that objects are, in fact, divisible from a certain standpoint).
The descriptive term favoured in the metaphysical framework proposed in this Holy Scripture is “Brahman”, a Sanskrit word meaning “expansion”, although similes such as “Sacchidānanda” (Eternal-Conscious-Peace), “The Tao”, and “The Monad”, are also satisfactory.
Perhaps the oldest extant metaphysical system, Advaita Vedānta, originating in ancient Bhārata (India), which is the thesis promulgated in this treatise, “A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, is a decompositional dual-aspect monist schema, in which the mental and the physical are two (epistemic) aspects of an underlying (ontic) reality that itself is neither mental nor physical, but rather, psychophysically neutral. On such a view, the decomposition creates mutually-exclusive mental (subjective) and physical (objective) domains, both of which are necessary for a comprehensive metaphysical worldview. The mere fact that it is possible for Awareness to be conscious of Itself, implies that, by nature, Ultimate Reality is con-substantially BOTH subjective and objective, since it would not be possible for a subject to perceive itself unless the subject was also a self-reflective object. The term “transjective” has been coined by contemporary scholars to account for precisely this reality.
This subject-object duality, and the notion of the transjective, is foundational to a complete understanding of existence/beingness.
Therefore, it seems that the necessary-contingent dichotomy often discussed by philosophers in regards to ontology, is superfluous to the concept of monism, because on this view, BOTH the subjective and the objective realities are essentially one, necessary ontological Being(ness). In other words, because you are, fundamentally, Brahman, you are a necessary being and not contingent on any external force. This concept has been termed "necessitarianism" by contemporary philosophers, in contradistinction to "contingentarianism" - the view that at least some thing could have been otherwise different - and is intimately tied to the notions of causality and determinism in Chapters 08 and 11.
Advaita Vedānta (that is, dual-aspect Monism) is the only metaphysical scheme that has complete explanatory power.
Hypothetically, and somewhat tangentially, one might question thus: “If it is accurate to state that both the Subject of all subjects and all possible objects, are equally ‘Brahman’ (that is, Ultimate Truth), then surely that implies that a rock is equally valuable as a human being?”. That is correct purely on the Absolute platform. Here, in the transactional world of relativity, there is no such thing as equality, except within the conceptual sphere (such as in mathematics), as already demonstrated in more than a couple of places in this Holiest of Holy Books, “F.I.S.H”, especially in the chapter regarding the spiteful, pernicious ideology of feminism (Chapter 26).
Cf. “advaita”, “dualism”, “Brahman/Parabrahman”, “Saguna Brahman”, “Nirguna Brahman”, “subject”, “object”, and “transjective”.
@@AbsolutePhilosophyHow do you arrive at the conclusion that christianity (and specifically the resurrection of christ) is true ? I mean : Do you think that you can prove god existence rationaly and then take a leap of faith from theism to christianity ? Maybe because you think that christian narrative makes sense (im talking about suffering).... Or : Are you the type that thinks can prove the resurrection as an historical event/fact ? Maybe using elements of history and antrophology . (No troll).
Best interview with Bernardo yet. Must feel so good to have had him enjoy it at least as much as you! Please push him on the NDE issue more. He takes psychedelic experiences seriously and uses them as data to support his view, but there are (scientifically vetted, with objectively verifiable details) NDE accounts that glaringly contradict what he says about meta cognitive abilities (or lack thereof) of mind at large. No one presses him on this.
lot of this is going over my head but I appreciate you going deep into Bernardo's ideas, good job. hope you 2 have more of these talks
This did not disappoint! Excellent conversation. Thanks so much for doing these interviews. Looking forward to reading your book when it comes out.
Very excited for this one!
You‘re both doing important work. Thank you for that 🙏🏼
How so?
Idealism:
Metaphysical Idealism is the view that the objective, phenomenal world is the product of an IDEATION of the mind, whether that be the individual, discrete mind of a personal subject, or otherwise that of a Universal Conscious Mind (often case, a Supreme Deity), or perhaps more plausibly, in the latter form of Idealism, Impersonal Universal Consciousness Itself (“Nirguna Brahman”, in Sanskrit).
The former variety of Idealism (that the external world is merely the product of an individual mind) seems to be a form of solipsism.
The latter kind of Idealism is far more plausible, yet it reduces the objective world to nothing but a figment in the “Mind of God”.
Thus, BOTH these forms of Idealism can be used to justify all kinds of immoral behaviour, on the premise that life is just a sort of dream in the mind of an individual human, or else in the consciousness of the Universal Mind, and therefore, any action that is deemed by society to be immoral takes place purely in the imagination (and of course, those who favour this philosophy rarely speak of how non-human animals fit into this metaphysical world-view, at least under the former kind of Idealism, subjective Idealism).
Idealism (especially Monistic Idealism), is invariably the metaphysical position proffered by neo-advaita teachers outside of India (Bhārata), almost definitely due to the promulgation of the teachings in the West of Indian (so-called) “gurus” such as Mister Venkataraman Iyer (normally referred to by his assumed name, Ramana Maharshi). See the Glossary entry “neo-advaita”.
This may explain why such (bogus) teachers use the terms “Consciousness” and/or “Awareness”, instead of the Vedantic Sanskrit word “Brahman”, since with “Brahman” there is ultimately no distinction between matter and spirit (i.e. the object-subject duality).
At the risk of sounding facetious, anyone can dress themselves in a white robe and go before a camera or a live audience and repeat the words “Consciousness” and “Awareness” ad-infinitum and it would seem INDISTINGUISHABLE from the so called “satsangs” (a Sanskrit term that refers to a guru preaching to a gathering of spiritual seekers) of those fools who belong to the cult of neo-advaita.
Although it may seem that in a couple of places in this treatise, that a form of Monistic Idealism is presented to the reader, the metaphysical view postulated here is, in fact, a form of neutral monism known as “decompositional dual-aspect monism” (“advaita”, in Sanskrit), and is a far more complete perspective than the immaterialism proposed by Idealism, and is the one realized and taught by the most enlightened sages throughout history, especially in the most “SPIRITUAL” piece of land on earth, Bhārata. Cf. “monism”.
N.B. The Idealism referred to in the above definition (and in the body of this book) is metaphysical Idealism, not the ethical or political idealism often mentioned in public discourse (e.g. “I believe everyone in society ought to be given a basic income”).
Therefore, to distinguish between sociological idealism and philosophical Idealism, the initial letter of the latter term is CAPITALIZED.
Both thinkers challenge the mainstream physicalist, reductionist, and materialist accounts of the world. While their alternative worldview is not fully developed and likely contains errors, I believe they are moving in a more promising direction than the mainstream narrative. From what I understand, you follow the Advaita Vedanta philosophy. Personally, I lean toward the anthroposophical worldview. So I don’t entirely agree with everything they propose, including their metaethics. That said, I appreciate their efforts to shift the mainstream discourse in a more constructive direction. ✌️
Bernardo IS doing what the one needs him to do. We need a real paradigm shift, not just the potential for it!
Can't wait to watch this! Thanks!
I remember when Bernardo started out posting his ideas on the Skeptiko forum back in the day...
I've been really looking forward to this Nathan. ❤
NIce to see the title has been changed! This is a wonderful discussion. Have watched several times. It’s a wonderful moment when Bernardo talks about his concession to time and space, as opposed to coming from eternity. This has been interpreted in Tao, Vedanta, Buddhism etc.
I was nine when the lights came on. I was swallowed by an overwhelming feeling of being "me" I don't remember if it was days or weeks, but for a while I was hyper aware of my breathing and movements and wanted desperately to escape from my body. It was surreal.
Bernardo is a true gem
Wow!!! Excellent discussion!!! Thank you!!!!
Edit: Nathan, this is my favorite Bernardo interview of all time. I subscribed to your channel.
Thank you for posting. Great to see these kinds of video on my feed. Happy Holidays everyone.
I would listen to these two talk for 3 hours every day. What a gift this conversation is. I will surely listen to this entire thing again in a few months. PS - I respect the clickbaity title ;)
Thanks for that! Most generous. And I think the title is fine too. It is what everyone wanted us to discuss, and it is part of what was concluded 😊
Wow now that’s what I call a Christmas gift! 😊 I am looking so much forward to enjoying this during my holiday 🙏
Totally agree... amazing Christmas present! :)
I rarely watch this kind of discussion a second time, but this one made me do it. Kudos to both!
I also have the bug (as referenced about 1:44)
I cannot thank you enough for this conversation and all of the other conversations which are the backdrop of my every day and resonate in a way that only someone who as you say ‘has the bug’ can understand.
Bernardo what you have said about the Daemon has helped me so much in having some level of understanding about what is happening to/in me, it has given me relief
This conversation made me see that Beauty which all too often we forget is all around us.
This was the most interesting and philosophically profound Kastrup conversation I’ve listened to. Very adroitly navigated, and pertinent questions eliciting helpful elucidations, especially on the issue of the possibility of mind-at-large being metacognitive (Kastrup’s previous statements over the years that mind-at-large doesn’t possess metacognition (of some sort) is an element of his idealism that I haven’t bought into)
Man, just when I thought I had a grip on Bernardo’s philosophy, he sits down with Nathan and now I know I will have to spend hours and hours to try and figure out what these two are on about!
Thank you for this discussion Nathan!
Such an amazing discussion. Thank you!
It sounded to me like Bernardo held firm to the idea that Mind at Large is *not* meta-cognitive…except insofar as evolutionarily advanced dissociated alters like us form within It. At least that’s how he sounded near the end of this long conversation, so maybe I already forgot the admission claimed in the title, in which case he contradicted himself later.
Well, both of them admitted to using clickbait thumbnails so this is par for the course.
He didn't. He stated that mind at large, in its eternal state beyond the dashboard, is indeed metaconscious. Kastrup speaks _as if_ it is not metaconscious because he adopts the reality of spacetime language for purposes of argument. But the perspective of mind at large is the privileged perspective. That's why it is _absolutely_ true to say mind at large is metaconscious, but from our temporally bound perspective it is _relatively_ true to say it is not metaconscious _now_ . This links to our discussion of Parmenides. There seems to be confusion on this point so I might do a video explaining what the core points were.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy. Can you define "metaconscious", please?😊
@@AbsolutePhilosophy I admit this was confusing and still is for me. Towards the end he explained that dissociative minds (if that exists at all..) have metaconsciousness which, by feedback to the 'source', gives her metaconsciousness.. So, my understanding is that meta is not a build-in function of MaL but is acquired during 'evolution'? Am I missing something?
@@James-ll3jb Good question. I'm familiar with the term 'metacognition, which Kastrup has used on many occation, and how metacognition relates sentient awareness. In that relation metacognition is a synonym for consciousness, and "metaconscious" sounds like pleonastic "metametacognition". If some other meaning is intended, I'd also like to hear what exactly.
Excellent discussion. Well done both.
Thx for pushing Bernardo!
Deep insightful conversation. Very enriching.
Glad you changed the title and thumbnail.
Terrence McKenna used to talk about reality being a crystal casting off reflections of itself. This feels similar to Bernardo's crystal of eternity.
The "meta" prefix adds magic to anything.
Just beautiful example of learning live, it's like watching a day in the life of Merlin and my the young Arthur. 🎉🎉🎉
Thanks again Nathan! I love the mutual level of respect you two have for each other, and I think its a really interesting dynamic that you both seem to agree on the idea at large (idealism) but have contentions with how this is reasoned and expressed. It reminds me of the appearance and the thing in itself, where the core idea(lism) is the thing in itself but how it manifests in your heads is what it looks like from the point of view of your own learnings. Also, most surprising fact is that you are 45! Haha, looking forward to more content :)
I have been pondering these questions for a lifetime. Happening upon Bernardo a few years ago has been life changing for me. I have one question still - does the universe care at all or is it simply a blind indifferent.unfolding of the unmanifest into the manifest? I wonder whether all-encompassing love could be an archetypal drive of the universe? This would be so much more 'intelligent' than our measly evolutionary achievement of metacognition.
Thank you Nathan for pushing these questions with Bernardo. Thank you Bernardo for your clear, insightful,
sincere intellect. What a gift this discussion is for Xmas day
Granny from NZ
Love ❤️ what you say and I’m a granny too!
I’m so glad you made this comment as this is exactly what I have been pondering about and I asked something similar in a comment to the previous video. I find it strange that the very topic and concept of (unconditional) love was only mentioned once in a casual way in this long conversation. It seems to me that these discussions seriously lack female perspectives and tend to stay in a very cerebral masculine kind of ‘intellectual masturbation’ lacking other angles of the human experience pondering these questions - and I am saying this as a man 😅
As I mentioned I asked in my comment to the previous video about earlier talks in videos with Rupert Spira and BK where Rupert Spira always holds on to the notion that Consciousness in essence IS love and BK at some point seemed to not want to contradict Rupert but no one has pressed BK on this and his stands that M@L is instinctive which I believe would be a contradiction.
Also it bothers me that BK and others interviewing him most often seem so narrow minded about the subject ‘the problem of evil’. I would love for someone (other than me) to suggest to BK a lot of past teachings like the late Danish mystic Martinus where the problem of evil is ‘easily’ understood in the model of a karmic system - where life on earth is one of many ‘schools’ to learn and grow and become more aware of love and cooporation through the experiences of suffering. To get back to the source of Love that all of this sprung from originally (the story of Eden etc. as a metaphor). “Evil” in this way would be merely a human morality judgement from a very limited perspective.
Anyway I think it’s peculiar that all encompassing unconditional Love is almost entirely absent from these discussions. I guess BK has his reasons as he explained about sticking to his rigorous line of arguing. I think we need to incorporate Love as I think this interviewer kind of suggested to make all of this more salient generally more helpful to the broader public and it’s growing struggles of meaning crisis.
Thanks for your encouragement with this question. I guess I am looking for hard evidence/experience that all encompassing love is fundamental or archetypal and I am not just wanting it to be that way to comfort myself. I have had glimpses in certain dream states not dissimilar to what Bernardo described as 'the gift' in his psychedelic experiences but like him I am wary of imagination/ self deception/ / wishful thinking/ other explanations. If it is the case all encompassing unconditional instinctual love is archetypal I assume it would also be all knowing and all peaceful. Metacognition would be neither here nor there.
I really want to get to grips with what 'The Blob' is and aware that time is running out.
Love Bernardo. Hope there may be more conversations with Nathan and Bernardo. Granny from NZ
@@JaneCotter-o8l - Well I am totally with you on that. I would really like to know too preferably through some kind of evidence/proof. Not to be disrespectful or a cynic but I guess we could tell ourselves that we will know soon enough after this time around dissociating 😉 But I grant you it would feel much more settling to know and understand now. Also it might accelerate positive human development if possible. I want that too.
@AbsolutePhilosophy I appreciate your rigor, your erudition, and your bringing to bear a first rate philosophical education. Your critiques and questions were excellent and they provided the space for what is the most comprehensive elucidation of Bernardo’s thought on UA-cam! So many of his videos cover the same (largely introductory) ground. @BernardoKastrup, I wholeheartedly encourage you to engage with such hosts (rare though they may be) more often! It’s great to hear you spread your wings a bit more.
Lastly, @AbsolutePhilosophy, I’d love to see you speak with Matthew @Footnotes2Plato. He’s largely known for his expertise in Process Philosophy and I find him humble, insightful, and smart.
Well done, you’ve certainly earned my sub!
Sounds like a good possible connection. And thanks for the generous comment!
Matt recently did an episode of ‘Theories of Everything’.. He has chatted with Bernardo as well. Links below.
ua-cam.com/video/DeTm4fSXpbM/v-deo.htmlsi=hbCicFhbbUV1SFYf
ua-cam.com/video/s7I5j2cteFQ/v-deo.htmlsi=_fGYhnT6uX8lBDw5
Near the end now. I could watch you two all day.
I appreciate you pushing into Bernardos ideas. I toss around a lot of ideas, even though the depths go beyond what I have properly thought through, I like to listen to the ideas tested at depth.
I tend toward an adherence to the law of logic, but I also recognize that they eventually break down. For instance the infinite potential preceded the actual, but what 'caused' the infinite potential to break symmetry for the actual to arise? It seems like something only a mind could do, but it also seems like any idea of what a mind is, would be contained in the infinite potential. So I am not sure the intuitionist is the best approach for the actual reality but I am also not sure the laws of logic can lead us to the promised land either.
Neither rational thought, nor empirical discovery lead to the promised land. They could only hint at it.
Perhaps the answer lies in embracing the tension between logic and intuition as a key to navigating between the potential and the real, without demanding a definitive resolution. After all, the "promised land" may be more of a horizon than a final destination...
You guys both have a beautiful mind! 🙂
Man I watch these because all philosophies need to be challenged, but these thumbnails are shameful. Have some integrity, don't make it look like you "got 'em!" that's gotcha journalism.
But your interviews are quite cordial and nuanced otherwise, keep up the good work!
Gotta play the game
@justinamos9223 not if you have integrity. Just ask Randy of Tegrity farms.
Tbh I wrestle with this in my own videos critiquing kastrup and sapolsky, I just use a picture of their book in my thumbnail, but I know I'd get more views if I made a more controversial titles and imagery.
I clicked it for the thumbnail and found Bernardo to be so gracious and open, helped me understand the scope of where he is coming from better. Only slightly glad for the thumbnail for that haha. But I agree with you!
See, Martin is the reason I have just excepted those type of thumbnails. It reaches people that would not watch the video otherwise, spreading good content (and good YTers). Otherwise, it would just be crappy content that uses these marketing techniques.
And I agree, I initially thought that YTers should rise above the need to employ clickbait, but as I realized the benefits of it, and that theres a level of it that I find acceptable (as well as a level I find repulsive which is usually a claim that is not at all demonstrated in the video) I’ve become much more comfortable with it.
Around 2:10:00-2:20:00 (mind-at-large, properties thereof), this sounds like the sublime (cf. Kant's Third Critique).
Fantastic discussion. Thanks.
This was great! Thank you!
Great and lowly are RELATIVE. 😉
Incidentally, are you VEGAN? 🌱
Awesome interview Nathan and Bernardo. Thanks.
I am not really concerned about what any particular person BELIEVES. You may believe that there is an old man with a white beard perched in the clouds, that the Ultimate Reality is a young blackish-blue Indian guy, that the universe is eternal, that Mother Mary was a certifiable virgin, or that gross physical matter is the foundation of existence.
The ONLY thing that really matters is your meta-ethics, not your meta-physics.
Do you consider any form of non-monarchical government (such as democracy or socialism) to be beneficial?
Do you unnecessarily destroy the lives of poor, innocent animals and gorge on their bloody carcasses?
Do you believe homosexuality and transvestism are moral?
Do you consider feminist ideology to be righteous?
If so, then you are objectively immoral, and your so-called "enlightened/awakened" state is immaterial, since it does not benefit society in any way.
That feels like someone butting into a conversation with someone else. Lol.
@@transcendentpsych124 She is spamming this entire comment section with her monologues.
@@FilipinaVegana Being a monarchist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist vegan who follows Advaita Vedanta is a bizarre combination of worldviews. You will find few people to be in complete agreement with you.
@@FilipinaVegana Being a monarchist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist vegan who follows Advaita Vedanta is a bizarre combination of worldviews. You will find few people to be in complete agreement with you.
This one was great!!!❤
Outstanding
One of the best conversations Bernardo did this year ❤🎉
And also thank you Nathan for the insights you bring, it always takes two to tango 😂
Our mind is the one that tries to divide things into "before" and "after", or "cause" and "effect", because that's how we can think.
Ultimately, I think the important thing is not so much to find a definitive answer, but to keep questioning and exploring. Perhaps the "meaning" of it all is exactly this: to live in doubt and discovery, without waiting for all the pieces to fit perfectly.
I think the mind notes regularities e.g. "before/after", "cause/effect", and the division within these dichotomies exist as apprehended, not created.
I wish Kastrup and the academic dude here would honestly confront these vital issues directly.❤
It's nice to think we will go on doubting and exploring 'ad infinitum', as no doubt we will, even AFTER defibitive answers to questions of ultimate meaning are reached!
I think you were partially correct. Philosophy and arguments must coher with REALITY in general and facts in particular. Cohering with sensations and feelings is the WORST metric, that's what caused the rise of Panpsychism, Idealism, and other philosophical chimeras.
The statements "It feels correct", "It's unsatisfactory", "How it's like to be a ..." are some examples of a bankrupt epistemology.
I feel like there were a couple of points where I feel like you were just one comment away from refuting a view Bernardo has but instead the conversation got sidelined in a direction I didn't see the relevance in.
Like, Kastrup seems to admit of these "archetypes" as having a role akin to Platonic Forms, so meta-cognition needs to be one such principle. But then isn't mind-at-large meta-conscious simply in virtue of this and not in virtue of it having dissociated states that are meta-cognitive? I feel like you tried to make this point but didn't press it hard or express it clearly enough.
Also related to meta-cognition I feel like Bernardo's view that it's somehow reducible to purely simple phenomenal states (for lack of a better term) has a rather glaring flaw. If meta-cognition is understood as "representing at a higher level" how can it be reduced to things which are purely going on at the lower level? In that way a reductive explanation seems impossible, and the presence of some purpose (like fitness for survival) is irrelevant. Phillip Goff said it to him once how this is the same reasoning physicalists use to render all mental phenomena explicable (they exist because it is useful for survival), and I agree.
Really all it comes down to is that mind-at-large needs to be at least meta-conscious for our meta-consciousness to be explicable, so it just isn't a superfluous posit like Bernardo seems to think.
As far as the concerns about evolution and inheritance of traits go, I think that Bernardo basically can't offer a good explanation because he lacks an explanation of dissociation in mind-at-large in general. His reasoning ends up being that there is a metaphysical process isomorphic to reproduction where dissociated states produce more dissociated states, which of course is just inferring its existence as a necessary condition of his thesis about representation of alters but not really rendering the process intelligible. The analogy to whirlpools isn't really helpful either since presumably the principles of fluid mechanics which explain whirlpools don't have much to do with mind-at-large, which is a simple mental substance and not a body of water.
There's potentially another issue of how two alters generating another one can be understood in mind-at-large as an eternal "space" where, unlike the sensible world, we cannot say that at one point there is a certain number of alters around and then at another there's more that have been born. But to be fair this is an issue that exists in general (not just for reproduction) and maybe has a similar equivalent for any idealist theory where time is just a feature of sense-experience.
Lastly I'll just reply to some of the comments on pluralism and at least what I think Leibniz would say (since the comment read was mine).
It is true that something like the interaction problem would exist if any contents the minds had depended on being impressed from "the outside." But if one has an idea like the one of preordained harmony then this isn't necessary. God would be the one imbuing all the monads with the "scripts" which give their unique essence (and in it the way everything else is represented), knowledge God has in virtue of knowing the nature of every possible world, and then actualize them through a kind of emmanatory process.
The multiplicity is a virtue and not a vice if one considers being, and by extension plenitude (in the world), as a mark of goodness or beauty as does Leibniz. Simply put, the world is rendered more rich by having more beings in it which don't compromise its harmonious unity. So it's by no means a mere complication that's being called for.
And this relevance of teleology might actually have a barring in some of these debates. Leibniz can't explain reproduction (on a metaphysical level) through monads interacting, since they in general don't. But he can say that God selected a world where reproduction works in such a way because it's better than some other.
Of course, the way that the mechanism of reproduction is obscure for Kastrup the "calculus of goodness" is here for Leibniz. But I think the latter is still better because a blank teleological explanation can still be understood as an explanation whereas something purely mechanical (which sounds like what Kastrup is going for pretty intentionally) is just obscure/occult.
Marry Christmas 🎅 to everyone here
Wedding Christmas?💍
@@FilipinaVeganajajajaja yes 👍
I've been delving into absolute idealism which is very congruous with phenomena like savant syndrome. Absolute idealists would say that logic and reason are immanent from the source as opposed to qualities that are arrived at or stumbled upon. This view is also congruent with Platonic realism where this reality is only a shadow of a more complete one. So metacognition isn't necessarily something that the mind of nature discovers through us, but rather, it is already an inherent capacity that finds expression in humans; and the same goes for states of confusion and autopilot. Mind at Large already knows that the awareness of awareness, or sapiens sapiens, is possible.
2 lines of questioning I am wondering about: What is really the difference between something the mind of nature discovers and an inherent capacity? (thinking metaphysically) Under both forms of idealism, isn't the reduction base of reality ONLY the mind of nature? If there is something that the mind of nature can discover, doesn't that make it an inherent capacity? I'm not sure if Kastrup would disagree with this point, along his "anything that can exist will/does exist" line of thought.
2nd completely unrelated question that your comment prompted: Does mind at large know THAT awareness of awareness is possible, or does it simply know the awareness of awareness? Actually I guess this is just another way of asking absolute or analytic idealism maybe. Hmm
thank you
one of the best yet
It's here!
If we imagine all the tools in a workshop as words and ourselves as the one who crafts, then we can see we are a witness, an observer of our creativity, one who produces within uncertainty. Something like that.
1:07:12 ..don't say that! I read BKs books in a somewhat weird order (not chronological) and ..in retrospect, it feels like a synchronistic choreography, it was the RIGHT order for ME it seems! Started off with the hardcore science-y / logical stuff, and 'Meaning in Absurdity' more towards the end and 'More Than Allegory' was my last book..
..and it hit DEEP! That one stirred up some dust for sure. Even after a severe crisis years back, that opened me up to ..many things, I still consider myself a very "head heavy" person for better or worse, so allowing myself to entertain and explore the edges by following along these books was a challenge, yet excitingly liberating! And very different than spiritual literature..
So should there be the urge to sally forth in this direction again, please do so (if possible). I recommend these books to anybody, but, as he wrote, some (lucky) few don't need them, but many many do I'm convinced.
It's nice to imagine that BK would somehow read this, but that probably won't be the case, anyway, I felt the need to express or critique that statement / judgement. Cheers.
wow ....... great!!!!!!!
Wow been looking forward to this thanks.
When you mention the relation between facism and materialism it reminded me a lot to Pius XI’s encyclical called Quadragesimo Anno. The project of that encyclical is precisely to attach both extremes of socialism and liberalism as consecuences of a materialistic perspective. All written in 1931
I wonder if Bernado would endorse 'following the evidence wherever it leads' to politics and history (I understand he couldn't afford to do that himself)
Real illumination for Christmas Eve- thanks for clearing the expression about we being monkeys around a rock - today i get it - but gods looking out through our eyes- wow❤
Bernardo said that the Universe most likely isn't metacognitive because there can't be universe-wide closed cognitive re-entrant loops that are usually associated with metacognition and metarepresentation, but I think you only come to this conclusion if you look from within the universe, if you're a dissociation inside the universe and you observe it. Then you will see classically looking things that aren't causally connected, from your point of view. The same can be said about entanglement - you can't send information through entangled particles, but that's only if you're already in the environment where the entangled particles live - ie, inside the universe. But the universe as a whole, as a "quantum object", must be viewed holistically - as a whole, not as parts.
In this sense, even if the universe is expanding and parts of it are causally disconnected (because information would need to travel faster than the speed of light to connect them), from its first-person experience it is still a whole. So I think it can still be metacognitive. I also don't think it needs to be put under the pressures of evolution to be metacognitive - it could be from the get-go (always was metacognitive) and only its dissociations evolve to re-discover the metacognition that was always there in Mind-at-Large (it would be like the dissociations re-discovering who they really are).
@@dubitanter Right, you would then assume computational causation at work.
“The language of God is silence, all else is poor translation.” - Rumi
What a title !… looking forward to see this
Bravo!!!!! Your retort "because it's an egg doesn't mean it gives a chicken" to his a...olish comment about cannons was very british and on-target. I would have laughed loudly first, then said "cannons, really?", and then given your retort.
Bernie thinks anything he is capable of imaginning must be true, because he is great.
36:46 theist. That is a deal breaker. Philosophy is just used to excuse the mental child abuse of religion. Mommy power.
I really like the channel! The question posed around 43 was great I have an more direct challenge . According to Kastrup the nervous systemic is a projection of our experiences on the "screen of perception". Suppose that I take a microelectrode and stimulate a peripheral sensory nerve in my leg. That leads to some experience, a sensation. It is a fact that (barring technical details) I will get the same sensation regardless of (i) where along the nerve I apply the stimulus, (ii) what metal the electrode is made of, or (iii) what shape the electrode has. Since there is only one experience how does the screen of perception "know" which one of these physical realities to "project" ? Moreover, what is the electrode a projection of before the experience starts?
wait...if we are part and parcel (although dissociated) of mind at large and we are meta cognitive doesn't that mean that mind at large is necessarily also meta-cognitive (through us?)... as long as mind at large is not dissociated from us. Wasn't this the principal point of Jung's Answer to Job? Also on the recursive application of archetypes... i believe that Jung also believed that the archetypes were subject to some modification as they interact with the subjects ... i think i remember him discussing about how archetypes were gradually changing over time. So there is some evolution happening in the archetypes.
Hi Nathan. At some point in this discussion you mention that you think "truth is the ultimate thought, goodness is the ultimate act, and beauty is the ultimate feeling". I'm very interested in exploring this idea. Do you have any recommendations where I can read more about this?
I didn't lift that from anywhere specific, but there is a long tradition in taking values to be the ultimate constituents of reality, dating back to Plato. The true, the good, and the beautiful often being seen to have special status. But it is FH Bradley that sees truth as being what our thought attempts to become as we comprehend reality "in the whole". And he also breaks with Hegel by thinking that feeling is something other than thought, and reality includes feeling. So I suggest reading Bradley, and if you want to you can become a member of the channel because I'm going through Bradley's great metaphysical work "Appearance and Reality" in members only videos, both reading and then explaining it. (Lots more on that is planned).
I’m curious do you hold any religious beliefs , curious if this supports your take on a meta cognitive absolute.
Read "More than allegory" by him
@ thanks for that suggestion. :) I should of been more specific it was directed at Nathan not Bernado.
@Soundsofanetwork Yes and yes. Although I keep they philosophical language and argument distinct from religious language as much as possible, and I leave the question of whether the Absolute is God independent of metaphysics.
I still think Bernardo and others interested in this topic should give them selves a chance to familiarize themselves with the teachings of the late Danish mystic Martinus. Explained here:
ua-cam.com/video/s6FVFb3m8so/v-deo.htmlsi=9zYlxkAvzfr9dJeT
I think Bernardo's cat is meta-conscious.
You nailed it! 😮
Well jokes aside, it would be very hard to prove otherwise.
Cats are mamalian animals just like us, their brain structure and function are of the same blueprint as us.
If we grant ourselves meta/access-consciousness, then our default assumption about cats' cognition should be the same, and NOT the other way around.
I agree
I think his cat is more conscious than him meta or not
@@swerremdjee2769 There goes mister hippie.
Without disagreeing, what do you mean by 'conscious' here sir?
While I like Nathan's framing from the intro., you are getting into dodgy territory when you start talking about what _you_ *_want_* God to Be. Like you have a choice in the matter? The beginning of all genuine philosophy is humility before The Absolute. If you don't have that then there's not going to be a lot of good coming from your fanciful ideas. What you _could_ do is start with the Absolute as the _actual_ Absolute, admit It is Unknowable, and then work downwards, which means, as in mathematical Set Theory, you are humble and abandon all pretensions to say anything about God (or even "the universe"), but you can reflect attributes that could be universals on existence at lower grades of the spirit. Then you can say useful things about normal daily practicalities like how we treat each other, macroeconomic justice, the funding in sciences, the banal evils of neoliberalism, the needlessness of war - you know, the moral and spiritual dimensions that matter a heck of a lot and justify giving public university philosophers a decent salaried job.
That subtle music in the background is troubling for me, but the conversation is outstanding:)
it's subtle enough that it doesn't bother me
I know! It was playing in the background of Bernardo's house.
Truth is a little bit more simpler than that. It's based off of trust.
Really Nobel and intelligent and respectful decent contrary and agreement dialogue - thank you - we are in the spiral becoming ordering principle in continuous complexity evolution ……Schrödinger said that our chromosomes are more a quasicrystal than a periodic that though beautiful repeats the same pattern as a quasi crystal exhibits ordered parts but also with freedom of expression but also respects the golden rato- but for ever new arrangements of complexity compared to masterpiece of embroidery to a tapestry of Raphael which shows no dull repetition . Merry christmas - so appreciate your respect and decency to each other- not like some others who seem to come on to show their ego and how much they know. We love Bernardo & Nathan
The thought experiment of the previous comment about peripheral nerve stimulation provides an objective means for determining whether conscious experiences or the physical world is more fundamental. What the experiment shows is taking the physical or mental as fundamental is not equally workable, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two. Each experience can arise from a huge variety of different molecular configurations of the brain and therefore the experiences simply cannot be the determinants of what the physical world is. The more fundamental level is obviously the one with the higher information content. This forces (at least Kastrup's version of) idealism to invent ever more arbitrary and bizarre things like experiences that we do not know we are having and the like.
Why are "experiences that we do not know we are having" bizarre?.
There are scientific experiments demonstrating we have experiences outside awareness. This is hardly arbitrary.
@@tiborkoos188 It’s more subtle that that. The brain and its processes are discrete, or digital. The perceptions, memories and ideas in the mind are continuous. We extract patterns from the information and join the dots. As Quine wrote, the continuous objects of perception and the continuum of real numbers are “convenient myths” which fill out discrete reality but contain it as scattered fragments. Since the cardinality of the continuum is higher than that of the natural numbers, the ideas in the mind may be considered as infinitely more complex than the stimuli in the external world.
@@richardatkinson4710 HI RIchard,
Are you the Atkinson I know ?
As for the comment. My first reaction was that if the ides of the mind are states of the brain than the total information content would be, at the maximum, equal to the integral of the p*log2(p) over the (continuous) probability distribution density over all degrees of freedom of all particles while for the world it would the same for all particles of the world, which of course would mu much larger. But then I realized that you may be right because the information content of the "world" for a human observed is limited by sensory resolution and the collection of distinct inputs (sensory experiences). This is quite interesting actually. Maybe what it means is that we can always create more through imagination then what we will ever perceive ? Cheers!
@@goran586 The world "experience" refers to the things that I find in my my subjective internal landscape (sounds, sights, feelings in my body, thoughts, emotions) when I use introspection to examine what's happening in my mind. Too say that I have an experience that I don;t know that I am having would obviously mean that I would not be able to find this "experience" within my inner world by introspection. But then how can I be possibly "experiencing" it ? He confuses unconscious processes of the brain with experiences. The very point of an experience is that I am conscious of it. He is trying to desperately protect his incoherent story by inventing nonsensical and arbitrary definitions like experiences that we are not experiencing. I can easly demonstrate why his idea is incoherent. Since these activities are not experienced by me - I cannot locate them in my mind, cannot identify or describe them, cannot even say WHEN they are happening - then what basis do we have for saying that these are "experiences" ? Why not unconscious brain processes ? What's more, Kastrup wants to argue that on the one hand, brain activity is not the cause of experience, but on the other, that brain activity proves that there is an "experience". So which one is it ? His whole story is completely incoherent.
BK’s analytic idealism is a great aspiration. There are a few things I think he gets wrong. I just listened to his use of the example of Conway’s Game of Life, where he seems to think the two rules of the Game generate great complexity. I think the Game is a really important (even unique) example for demonstrating the potential of Zuse’s “Calculating Space” (the universe as a cellular automaton). But the complexity has to be put in. A sole live cell (or bit) disappears in the first “generation”, after which nothing happens. By contrast, Paul Rendell’s fully complete universal Turing machine starts with several million live cells, each one exactly placed in a huge field of dead cells. This is an extremely exciting invention/discovery, but there’s no easy route there from any simpler pattern.
Fine tuning: the problem here is the arbitrary assumption of time arrow from bing bang to now. Leave this conservative assumption and think of big bang as result of the conscious now backwards. Fine tuning solved. This is first step. Now go one step further and give up causality all together. Big bang is happening now, the only now there is. Fine tuning is red herring.
When doe’s Bernardo say the universe is meta cognitive?
So the original thumbnail went away. I guess BK had enough free will to complain
Was the original image a click bait? Does BK concede metacognition or not?
I'm my opinion, yes he does at the level of eternity, which, since time is not ultimately real, means M@L is metacognitive, especially if this level of speaking concerns absolute truths, which Kastrup seems to admit. But concerns were raised by Kastrup that the claim should only be presented within the context of the discussion, not in the title. So I changed it. Was it click bait? Yes and no. I thought it was the most interesting aspect of the discussion, so the most likely to get a click. But it was not misrepresentation.
@AbsolutePhilosophy thanks!
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Was the concept of Mind at Large discussed in the previous video?
newborn baby??!! Congrats Bernardo! I somewhat remember him being child free by choice, happens to us all :)
what about virtual reality and Tom Campbells My BIG TOE ?
I don't seem to see a significant difference between what Castrup proposes and any theoretical subtrate that gives rise to fundamental physics, like String Theory.
I think BK is right to discuss Wigner’s “Unreasonable Effectiveness…” paper when trying to include mathematics in his metaphysics. But my own view is that Wigner’s view of mathematics as a miraculous windfall for scientists is quite wrong. The laws of physics - as Exner taught, and as his student Schrödinger believed all his life, are all statistical. Any statistical pattern can be approximated to any degree of accuracy by a range of analytic functions. Weinberg suggested as much in his “Dreams of a Final Theory”, I think (all physical laws may be approximate).
Why this misleading title???
1:50:00
The fruit is always older
Than the tree from where it grows
Like the dream in every creature
And the mind from where it flows
Bernie only repackaged Platonism into a Panpsychist box and put a computational metaphor as a bow.
"Any smart Alec and their friend" prefer Science instead of Philosophy, because Science CAN show it works in REALITY. Philosophy, especially Metaphysics is ALL about guesswork fueled or fed with ignorance about the facts of the matter.
Kastrup actually made me realise that I’m an idealist and that I’m far from alone in that, so I’m forever in his debt.
However, the more I’ve contemplated idealism the more problems I see with Kastrup’s “analytic” version.
The main problem I have with it, is that if everything is “experience”, it does not mean that every experience has to belong to a corresponding “experiencer”. I feel this is a neat trick to let AI correspond on a 1 to 1 basis with physicalist scientific explanations, and to avoid the black hole of solipsism, but it stretched my credulity to the limit.
Are we supposed to really believe that every thing observed apart from living organisms belongs to one singular “mind at large” that somehow holds the entire universe together at once? It honestly just seems absurd.
To me it seems much more likely that many things are “just observed”, they are mere representation, and they do not have their own corresponding inner existing consciousness, of any kind.
Think of a dream. It would be very strange to claim that a character that you imagined in your dream had their own inner life, that they effectively are born, live, and die within the confines of your short dream.
This is literally one of the first things covered in his dissertation/his main paper on analytic idealism. The relationship between subject and object. It also comes up in the last interview he did on this channel.
@ he wouldn’t be much of a philosopher if he hadn’t covered it. I do have respect for him for actually putting forward a positive metaphysical explanation and backing it, it’s much more than most theorists are willing to do, and I wish more would act with this conviction.
'many things are “just observed”, they are mere representation' - representation of what? If you believe there are objects that don't correspond to any mind, you are not an Idealist. (of course if you choose not to be an idealist, that's okay)
@ I believe that the base of all reality is experience. That is, that “physical” objects only exists as experiences. A conscience being can be regarded as a centre of experience, and reality is a tapestry where many such centres overlap. Our dreams and imagination are places where our experience doesn’t need to overlap with others, which is why they are far more flexible, whereas reality is a shared experience built up by millions of minds over millions of years. I don’t believe that each and every physical object in the universe is somehow held together by a singular “mind at large” though.
In fact it can be seriously questioned whether the cosmos actually exists at all; the only thing we can really say is that it appears to exists from our perspective.
Maybe that’s a version of idealism or maybe not, as I don’t care for labels.
@@tommoody728 So you believe in overlapping experiences between different people i.e. if you can see a tree, I will also be able to see a tree in the same location. But you don't believe those overlapping experiences are grounded in anything, neither a Universal Mind nor a physical world. Idk, that seems like a worldview that doesn't explain anything.
Round about 44mins BK says that the world - the ideal or mental world - calculates what comes next (or what to do next). I think that’s wrong. Mathematicians choose the model to fit the data, but the data are just statistics.
Bernardo should have a chat with Edward Frenkel
Too much thinking too little direct experience. Instead of more western philosophy a bit more eastern influence would serve Bernardo more.
1:03:00
So Kastrup cannot run an argument without affirming what he aims to deny? Brilliant!
This is a paradigmatic case of self-refutation.
If anything he admitted his position is inconsistent.
What a dumb and incorrect takeaway. the limits of language and human cognition hold for literally all attempts at explaining the world.
@Sam-hh3ry This is a call for all Kastrup fanboys. If you have something worth bringing, go ahead. If not, stop throwing rants under my comment!
@@anteodedi8937
@Sam-hh3ry
πριν από 1 ώρα
What a dumb and incorrect takeaway. the limits of language and human cognition hold for literally all attempts at explaining the world.
@@masticloxpoker1006I agree with Kastrup characterization of mind at large as non-higher ordering, non-meta-consciousness monism, what Schopenhauer call the (entailing) eye of nature, which does infinitely extrapolate as primary coherence, appearing to our meta-conscious reporting as developmental, thee primacy of first and ultimate, ‘as if’ spontaneous causation, etc.
There are layers to this.
❤❤❤
1:54:24 Canine dissociation. ua-cam.com/video/2O15DXv3Vwg/v-deo.html