Someone really needs to try to give Bernardo Kastrup more publicity. I'm sure even one debate with any of the intellectual celebrities like Sean Carroll or Sam Harris would be enough to get him the attention he deserves.
I personally would like to see him debate with the fantastic Roger Penrose. Apparently they did come together on e time but the video is not available. By the way do watch the recent video of Brian Green with Penrose to see why science fascinates and not so much metaphysics.
I facilitated his interview with EBTV check them out. I want to see him go head to head with Roger Penrose or Richard Dawkins et al Several years ago we debated Worelee over on Amazon I asked him a question about the Hidden Observer and he took a week to come back with a spurious load of bloviations which was risible.
@Sassan There's no need to give quackery and Idealistic nonsense more publicity. It looks like most people know Idealism is quackery and whacked out garbage.
To be honest, massive respect to Dr Woerlee - most materialists scoff at these ideas, but he was happy to have some fun and think about it and play with the idea. What a champ! And Kastrup was great as usual!
Kastrup was great? with what his undefined terms describing vague deepities about streams and whirlpools and magical substances consisting what we register in our Cataleptic impressions?
@@homelander-enjoyer That is not an argument. That is a way to avoiding facing the problems of an unfalsifiable worldview! Kastrup never defines the term "consciousness" or its ontology. It just talks about streams and whirlpools..and absolutes.. His claims are not based on knowledge and his conclusions are not testable. This is pseudo philosophy. He cherry picks the content in our conscious states that allows him to presume the idea he needs to prove. So the issue here is not if I have trouble understanding Kastrup's pseudo philosophy but if most of you in here understand what Philosophy is and what is the method and applications of it.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 *_"You said: We have zero contribution by Idealism in our Scientific Epistemology ...and that is a huge problem for those who support such useless ideologies."_* We do not decide the truth value of a statement by how useful that truth is to us, and I believe that arriving at truthful statements is its own reward. *_"You said: That is not an argument. That is a way to avoiding facing the problems of an unfalsifiable worldview! "_* There are no logical problems with the view that Bernardo has taken. It is perfectly tenable, parsimonious, and compatible with everything that science has observed. *_"You said: Kastrup never defines the term "consciousness" or its ontology. It just talks about streams and whirlpools..and absolutes.."_* Actually, he has defined consciousness and mind -- he has taken mainstream idealist definitions of the words. *_"You said: His claims are not based on knowledge and his conclusions are not testable. This is pseudo philosophy."_* His claims are based in logic and reason, and his conclusions logically follow. There is no universally accepted set of standards for the term _"pseudo philosophy",_ and every usage of the term is highly contentious. Loosely defined as it is, you could call any branch of philosophy _"pseudo philosophy"._ So, your usage of the term amounts to nothing more than a fancy way of saying _"I do not like your philosophy"._ Here are the facts - all mainstream dictionaries, the vast majority of philosophers, and the vast majority of people on this planet consider metaphysical answers to the question _"what is the nature of reality"_ to be the territory of philosophy. In fact, I would wager that the very first thing that most people think of when they hear the word _"philosophy"_ are the big questions that cannot be answered through direct observation. So, into the trash your opinion goes! *_"You said: He cherry picks the content in our conscious states that allows him to presume the idea he needs to prove."_* There is something it is like to be me. That is the direct fact of existence. Unlike the direct fact of existence, which certainly exists, the idea that there exists physical non-conscious _"stuff"_ can be doubted. So, it is not _"cherry picking"_ to place the direct fact of existence above physicality. It is actually more parsimonious to explain things in terms of the direct fact of existence than it is to explain them in terms of non-mind! *_"You said: So the issue here is not if I have trouble understanding Kastrup's pseudo philosophy but if most of you in here understand what Philosophy is and what is the method and applications of it."_* I know what philosophy is. It is you who has trouble, as the narrow vision of philosophy that you have is at odds with all mainstream dictionaries, the vast majority of philosophers, and the vast majority of people on this planet.
I agree. I believe Bernardo is the most important philosopher of our time, it is exciting to see how things develop. His notion of reality is clear, deep, reasonable and by far the best option on the table.
It's standard idealism. An old, venerable philosophical position. Extraordinary thing, ignorance, ain't it. And idealism is either solipsistic or a god-of-the-gaps argument. Castro is in the former camp. Reality is 'subjectivity'. Ask him how he can be objective about that 😂
@Fosmea he's not a philosopher. In fact, he fares pretty terribly against actual philosophers. He's an idealism fundamentalist, much like a religious fundamentalist.
A likeable and soft discussion, much different than many debates you see these days. A respectful exchange of positons. When can we see the next round?
What a pleasure to see two gentlemen debate with full respect for each other's ideas! Let us be advised that the age-old materialism-idealism debate will not be resolved or go away anytime soon...
@nickolasgaspar9660 they're well established philosophical positions. Wtf are you talking about? There are others. Advance another, not your own ignorance of philosophy.
@@lioneye108 No, a degree doesn't ensure the quality of metaphysics. The quality of metaphysics is defined by the epistemic connectedness between the expressed views and the available objective facts (and whether we can falsify those views). Now degrees in philosophy only tell us that the guy is trained in Chronicling(he is aware of philosophical ideas of the past and present and he knows who coined them). They don't guarantee us the quality of his reasoning or if his scientific knowledge is up to date.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 science and philosophy are not the same thing. Don't get them confused (Even though he has a science doctorate too and published many top articles for scientific American). I think the only problem here is that you don't like his philosophy. But you clearly haven't studied his work or know much about him. Calling him a pseudo philosopher is a bit like calling hawking a pseudoscientist. Its just a bit silly really.
@@lioneye108-" science and philosophy are not the same thing." -Correct, Science (Natural Philosophy) is the best way to do philosophy. When we have data we do Science When we don't we do philosophy. To be fair Philosophy is the main tool and Science is the 2nd most important step in The philosophical Method (defined by Aristotle: 1. Epistemology 2. Physika(science) 3. Metaphysics 4. Aesthetics 5. Ehtics.6. Politics) -"(Even though he has a science doctorate too and published many top articles for scientific American)" -In reality and to be precise, there isn't such a thing as a "science doctorate"(but I get what you are saying). All philosophers and scientists are awarded Phds (doctor philosophiae) so he has a Philosophical Doctorate on a specific scientific field. That doesn't ensures the quality of his metaphysics if his philosophical principles are not those of Methodological Naturalism(which aren't), if his scientific knowledge is outdated or ignored(both are true) and his reasoning is based on unfalsifiable pressumptions. _" I think the only problem here is that you don't like his philosophy." -Again we agree. I don't like his philosophy, not due to any personal bias, but because it is really bad philosophy! He ignores our Scientific epistemology, He ignores the real role of any philosophical framework (produce wise claims about the world based on current knowledge) He ignores the common usage of words and avoids giving clear or any definition of the terms he uses. He is a really bad philosopher but I love his personal channel on 8bit machines...I am subscriber!!!! -"But you clearly haven't studied his work or know much about him." -Unfortunately for him...I have and I have verified his bad practices in his philosophy. -"Calling him a pseudo philosopher is a bit like calling hawking a pseudoscientist." -lol not really. Hawking metaphysical hypotheses are based on what we know now and what the laws as we know them can produce beyond our limits of investigation. Kastrup, ignores the latest Neuroscience and produces ideas that are untestable and outside our Cataleptic Impressions. Its like me telling you I am rich because I have a giant diamond hidden under the surface of Zeus's 50th moon. To be clear, I think Materialism does the same thing with less risk by still the claim is unfounded. There is a huge difference in their metaphysics sir! can you see it?
I am a skeptic when it comes to ESP. But I have huge admiration and respect for Bernardo. I find his philosophy very interesting and admittedly, despite being biased towards Materialism (but not a full blown materialist), I can rarely disagree with anything he says. He is very thorough and careful with words. I love his rigour. Now ESP anyone know of any good experiments done that show signs ESP may be possible? I cant come across any. Any links or resources would be much appreciated. I am fully aware of the replication issue in these, like most psychology/social experiments
Remote viewing research shows the anomaly exists within a probability range of 4 to 7 sigma. Higgs Boson research was awarded the Nobel at 5 sigma. The results of this research is supported and backed by the American Statistical Association. They have been around since 1851. Jessica Utts was the director of the ASA at the time she backed this research at that level of probability. If you are skeptical you should do research. There are people who have honorary badges from several police departments for solving crimes. It's worth putting time into to understand it better. There is a collective consciousness at large.
I wish Bernardo had been given the opportunity to respond to Dr. Woerlee's defense of the materialistic answer to the 'hard problem of consciousness.' To me, that was the elephant in the room in this entire debate, yet he was not given a chance to set forth his objections to materialist position directly. The two of them could have spent the entire hour discussing this issue alone.
With all due respect to dr Gerald Woerlee, it's about time materialists realized they have been chasing their tails for quite a long time. It's time to think outside the box. I'd love to see more researchers studying Bernardo's position which could bring lots of new advancements to many areas of knowledge.
How can an unfalsifiable worldview can ever bring new advances to knowledge???? that a new one! Idealism makes claims for the unobservable, underlying nature of reality which lies beyond our Cataleptic Impressions and all our current methods of investigation. Idealistic claims are not based on knowledge, thus they can not be wise, so they can never help us expand our understanding for our world or even inform any of the rest of our philosophical branch(ethics, politics epistemology). Its an epistemically useless death denying ideology and nothing more. Its a declaration of what some people belief IF they decide to ignore what our impressions record about the world. No real philosophical value in this idea.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 It is notfalsifiable.Just prove that matter or anything physical exist without Consiousness..So far no experiment has proven it .Infact to the contrary the reverse is getting proved (Check Alain Aspect). Regarding using Idealism in Science,It is not that difficult.Infact Science is just a extension ..
@@SB-wu6pz You are trying a rhetorical game about the symbol "to exist" I can play that game too and define: To exist symbolizes = means "to cause" = to have react Someone observes a slut = their brain reacts: It fabricates, from/about the slut, the property=abstract asserted as beauty. Someone else observes the same slut and their brain fabricates, from/about the slut the property=abstract asserted by the muscles of assertion, reactzing to the brain: As "ugliness." *The momentarily-being properties=abstracts (imaginary) are the elements of one's consciousness (imaginary). Iow the consciousness is individual, it is the properties=abstracts being made up in an individual brain, momentarily.* The consciousness is, like its possible elements the properties=imaginaries, imaginary-non-causal = epiphaenomenal, rather than real = causal. Dr.B.Kaastrup's rhetorical trick is to boldly assert, that - rather than the brain, the consciousness be very real, and it be observing the very real namely the properties called beauty and ugliness. Although literally every child knows: - the property is invisible TO the eye - the property is (ONLY!) IN the eye Dr.B.Kaastrup is a veeery smart deceiver, but by he's own admission that the brain and all that is outside the brain are material he, unbeknownst to himself, settles the case, agains he's further assertions, erecting an edifice of lies, laid down in 7 books. This is outrageous (to me, you know, at this point that outragedness is IMAGINARY, does technically NOT exist is just epiphaenomenal)
@@SB-wu6pz "Just prove that matter or anything physical exist without Consiousness." -Sure......if you explain what do you mean by this entity you call Consciousness! -"So far no experiment has proven it ." -No experiment? I can deprive you from all your sensory systems so your awareness is dramatically limited...or even better render you unconscious and put you in a car and put your feet on the accelerator. Do you think that reality will make you a favor and drive without interacting with anything physical? -"Infact to the contrary the reverse is getting proved " -What is the reverse??? -"Regarding using Idealism in Science,It is not that difficult.Infact Science is just a extension .." -The metaphysical Principles of Idealism offer zero epistemic or predictive power...its like a god hypothesis that exists at a realm that doesn't make any sense or has an affect in our lives. ITs an unfalsifiable pseudo philosophical worldview which is irrelevant to our philosophy or science. We can not work upon this hypothesis and produce wise or epistemic claims about reality. Its a useless new age type of religion.
@@kleenex3000 The problem with KAstrup's claims is that, he cherry picks specific things among a wide variety of contents in our Conscious States. The same mechanism that enables us to be aware of the physical world also let us know that we have the ability to be aware. So our conscious states inform us for our mental impressions (Able to be conscious, able to reason, able to produce thoughts and have dreams) but also inform us for our Physical Impressions(our car, wife, table, chairs walls). SO our conscious states can only work within our Cataleptic Impressions and have no clue whether the things register by them have a different ontology from what they display. HE promotes a meta-ontological ideology that goes beyond our Cataleptic Impressions, promoting an unparsimonious and unfalsifiable mental ontology for our Physical Impressions. Kastrup is clever. He dresses up a death denying ideology in a "philosophical" robe and use it to ease people's existential and epistemic anxieties. Easy money, this is what religions have being doing for ages.
What a fascinating discussion! So amazing to see 2 different people with different opinions coming together and sharing their perspectives with respect. Doesn’t get much better than this.
Many people have told Gerald that his claim that people who have NDE's are hallucinating them does not stand up to scrutiny, people come back with veridical information which is corroborated by others so it's not anecdotal. Furthermore, scientists love to use labels by claiming its a hallucination they have not explained anything they just labelled it.
Actually that's not true. The current best studies on NDEs show that the incidences of veridical information from NDE patients who somehow "should not have known that info" is so low that it cannot be considered anything but anecdotal. Furthermore, there are never any smoking gun examples, like naming the sequence of numbers or the hidden picture (not that I'm aware of). The point is that NDEs should be massively corroborated and easy to verify if they were in fact examples of disembodied mind traveling around the material world and picking up information the body could not know; it should be happening all the time. Instead, it happens that, something like taking hundreds or thousands of cases, the only meaningful analysis can be conducted on fifty or two hundred cases, and of those cases, only one or two reported veridical information. It's too low to be considered evidence for out of body experiences.
@@superdog797 Are you aware of the book _The Self does not die_ by Titus Rivas. Its main theme is all about the veridical perceptions & they document 100s of cases in there. If you are aware then comment why you think these _veridical perceptions_ are invalid. Im curious to know criticisms of it as Ive had my doubts but am willing to believe many veridical accounts are valid testimonies.
@@Yameen200 If it's not empirical then it's not actually veridical - it's anecdotal. Empirical means we can conduct an experiment in which a predictable outcome occurs, and that is precisely what nobody ever gets in empirical NDE studies. Just think about it. If, at death, people actually float out of their bodies, or read someone's mind, or whatever the supposed claim is that would be impossible, then any time you make a random selection of individuals and establish a criteria you are looking for (how often did they guess the hidden image right? how often did they describe the secret image or word in the hidden envelope? how often did they name the object that was out of view?) you should get not only a set of "hits" that is greater than chance, but upon repeating the experiment over and over again and the data set increases there should be, according to the law of large numbers, a formula that describes the aggregate distribution of probability of getting a "hit" in any case. Thereby, you would develop a statistical model of how often an NDE would reveal something that is "impossible". If NDEs represent paranormal phenomena that are "legitimate", then this should be very simple to do because any time you run an experiment you should get reproducible data. That's just basic science fundamentals. Instead, we never get that. NDE studies always come up short. Nothing better than chance, or they never identify the hidden image or number, etc. - the criteria are never met. That is evidence consistent with hallucination. Doesn't mean something more isn't going on - just means there's no evidence. If you're aware of any empirical evidence I'm open-minded, but anecdotal evidence is problematic in too many ways.
@@superdog797 Well I take it you are a hard advocate of empiricism or leaning towards scientism. I presume you classify the _research_ by these individuals involved in NDEs as pseudoscience? I guess at the end of the day it depends what type of epistemology or evidence you consider most valid & which will then impact your conclusions. I don't think these NDE studies claim that their results are something you can obviously replicate over & over. Not to mention many of these researchers ie sam parnia for instance complain of the lack of funding as well as the fact that attempting to track every patient during emergency situations for NDE verification would have ethical difficulties. There are presentations of that book which mention various anecdotal cases as well as an interview with the author by seeking I. You can find it here. Make what you will of it. pseudoscience or not it would be highly small-minded to ignore such cases unless everybody is in on a huge conspiracy of deception or all these cases are mass cases of schizophrenia. Of course i have some doubts that perhaps their methodology is flawed highlighting their own cognitive biases but nevertheless perhaps check it out before refuting it ? ruclips.net/video/djEe3Diq_YM/видео.html ruclips.net/video/AUFc8zFikMs/видео.html ruclips.net/video/2qJ5UGbBGhg/видео.html
@@Yameen200 They may not claim that they can replicate them over and over but if it's a real phenomenon then that's what would happen: it would happen over and over again. What would it otherwise mean to say that "NDEs are real paranormal events"? You're saying that it *won't" happen over and over again? Or are you saying it *will* happen over and over again and that this recurring pattern of phenomena is what NDEs *are* ? If it doesn't happen over and over again then it's not a "phenomenon" - it's just something that (might have or might not have) happened in the past a certain finite amount of times and since you're saying it won't happen over and over again it will not happen again, so it can't be studied, so nobody can make any epistemic claims about them as a phenomenon, which is the same thing as saying "it won't happen again and therefore there's no difference in the future if these events don't happen at all anyway". The whole point is that scientific method is not biased against *any* phenomenon whatsoever - it just says we can study those things we can study, and that's it. I'm not a believer in "Scientism" like someone else believes in "theism" or "realism" or "anti-realism" - I just look at the plain fact that scientific method produces reliable knowledge, and everyone else is just guessing. Some of them, some of the time, are going to land on the correct idea by chance, but the vast majority of them will just be wrong...because they have no reliable methodology. So why listen to them? Use the methods that are reliable. I don't ignore any cases - I've looked into this over a long period in my life and a persistent pattern has emerged that has allowed me to develop a heuristic that this category of claim is basically "bullshit". It just saves me time because I don't have to go investigating every single claim over and over again because eventually you see the pattern emerge that they are, in fact, "bullshit" - there's no good evidence. Nevertheless, I do, as part of healthy skepticism, remain totally openminded on the matter, and periodically re-evaluate my views and the current claims on the matter. Always turns out the same way - no evidence is no evidence. I have no significant bias against the idea - if there's empirical evidence I'll be happy to say "yea, there's something to that". Until then, there's no reason to assume there is. NDEs are not an example of mass schizophrenia or deception - they're just hallucinations, plain and simple - that hypothesis is consistent with all the empirical evidence available to us (that I'm aware of - is there some I'm not aware of you think is relevant?). Why should we therefore think that there is something more to this when we have a perfectly good explanation that is consistent with how we know the world works - hallucination. I myself have had vivid hallucinations that were total out of body experiences - it was a hallucination. I myself have woken up from dreams - more than once - where I had assumed an avatar within my dream world that lived a lifetime of memories of hundreds or thousands of years, had family, unique identity, no knowledge of my Earthly body, and a life as an alien being - massive time distortion - all constructed by my brain in the course of either seconds, minutes, or hours in the night while I was dreaming. I woke up with the experience fresh in my mind and unable to get a grip on the real world for a few minutes, nearly mourning the fact that my avatar world was not "the real world" because it had seemed so real while I was in it, so much so that when I awoke, it took me a few minutes to come back to reality and remember who I really was. This is just what the brain is capable of and it's just hallucination. I know even in my experience it had to have been hallucination for many reasons, not the least of which was that, in retrospect, there were elements from the dream world that I had seen in real life - my brain created that reality from prior elements in the real world - it's not like my "consciousness" "actually" inhabited some other alien lifeform when that happened. This is simple and sufficient explanation, and NDEs are readily explained in similar ways. I will look at the links you provide, but I think it's important to realize how bad our intuitions when it comes to distinguishing between an event that is "just a weird coincidence" and "some event that represents a hidden, paranormal event" - especially given that the human brain evolved to overdetect agency. You have to come to grips with - realize - that this weakness in human cognition makes empirical method one of, if not the only, reliable method of establishing common knowledge we can all agree on. Even if there is other knowledge some happens to have and they can't demonstrate it to us in a reliable way that's just too bad - we're just up the creek without a paddle and you can't found an epistemic system of knowledge on those ways of thinking because they're not reliable and then we're just at the mercy of any crazy assertion that we choose to believe. I'm even sympathetic to weird metaphysical notions about reality but suspend judgment until I see the evidence. When I was a kid for years I was fascinated with paranormal activity, pseudoscience claims, had an open mind, looked into a bunch of them, etc., and over the years of my adolescence just saw, one by one, that they were all bullshit, systematically shaving away layers of a view of "maybe this could be true", until eventually there was so little left that I just can't take it seriously anymore when I first hear about claims that fit into those categories. I'm not closed minded about any of it - I just recognize that that way of thinking is overly credulous. That's all. And if at the end of the day anyone sees this about me and says "You're just biased" that's perfectly fine! Go out, establish some relevant evidence that actually counts, and my personal bias won't be relevant anymore. I doubt you'd even disagree that anecdote isn't good evidence, would you?, so why do you think it would be relevant in the context of NDEs, especially given the peer-reviewed, empirical literature on the subject that always turns up jack-diddley? Why is it so hard to just suspend judgement and call a spade a spade?
Woerlee addressed the hard problem with the standard answer of 'consciousness emerges at a certain level of complexity'. A standard reply to that is that it appeals to magic. I am not sure about that but I think the important point is that appealing to complexity doesn't solve or get around the hard problem because what still hasn't been explained is how, by virtue of complexity, consciousness emerges or is produced. One has just introduced one potential way in which consciousness can be thought to emerge or be produced but one hasn't gotten any way near solving the hard problem.
But I’m not sure how the part about life programming is thought to explain consciousness as a product of brains and bodies. Is the idea just that life programming of a certain type together with complexity produces consciousness? If so, then the same problem applies: one has just introduced one potential way that consciousness can be thought to be produced without explaining how, by virtue of life-programming of a certain type together with complexity, consciousness emerges or is produced.
Well thats the basic assertion : The more complex life became the more likely consciousness would be needed thus it will eventually emerge. The future of science will solve this problem through some fancy quantum neuroscientific principles & thus consiousness will be able to be duplicated/uploaded/quantified. So thats the 2 camps we have. One says science will solve it & its a god of the gaps & the other says it cant be solved bcoz mind was always eternal & uncaused.
@@Yameen200 The point with my initial comment is that appealing to complexity and/or life progrsmming does not constitute anything like a solution to the hard problem or any way of escaping facing the hard problem contrary to what some people seem to think. >>”Well thats the basic assertion : The more complex life became the more likely consciousness would be needed thus it will eventually emerge.” I understand that that is an assertion that is being made. There are all kinds of assertions made about all kinds of things. That’s a trivial point. But you obviously don’t think it is trivial. Otherwise you wouldn’t have written this. So, I must be missing your point with this remark. >>“The future of science will solve this problem through some fancy quantum neuroscientific principles & thus consiousness will be able to be duplicated/uploaded/quantified. “ Either this is just an anargued assertion, the point of which I fail to realize, or it is begging the question because to assert that science will solve the hard problem in the future assumes that consciousness is a product of physical facts about brains and bodies which is the very thing that’s in question in this context. >>”So thats the 2 camps we have. One says science will solve it & its a god of the gaps & the other says it cant be solved bcoz mind was always eternal & uncaused.”” Who is purportedly performing a god of the gaps and what is the reason for thinking that it is a god of the gaps?
@@Yameen200 I also feel like I have to address the point about an alleged god of the gaps. I’m not sure what you mean but I feel like I must address what I assume you mean because such an allegation regarding commiting a god of the gaps fallacy is so common and such a stupid point IMO that I need to say something about this. So, if you meant to eco one of the standard materialist/emergentist talking points that when dualists and idealists appeal to the hard problem of consciousness which is the problem for materialists and emergentists, etc. to explain how and why, on the view that consciousness is product of physical facts about brains and bodies, the physical produces or results in facts about phenomenal consciousness, then they are appealing to an as of yet unexplained problem regarding consciousness on the basis of which they conclude god’s existence or the existence of some other non-biological minded or conscious being. In effect, this can basically be captured as ‘science doesn’t understand consciousness in physical terms, therefore God, or cosmic consciousness did it’ or something like that. I hope that’s a fair steelman. Now, the problem with this objection is as follows: Firstly idealists aren’t necessarily arguing for god’s existence. So therefore, technically speaking, accusations leveled at idealism broadly regarding god of the gaps is just a non-starter. However, the objection can still be that idealists often make an argument that’s structurally equivalent or similar to a god of the gaps by instancing say a didit fallacy according to which ‘something happened. I don’t know why. Therefore, X (e.g. God or cosmic consciousness) did it.’ However, this is not the type of argument to which idealists appeal with regard to the hard problem of consciousness. The argument is not that because there is no sufficient physical account of consciousness, cosmic consciousness exists. Rather, the main point that’s being made (and this is the key point!) is this: The failure of the view according to which consciousness is a product of physical facts about brains and bodies to account for consciousness in physical terms is a relevant point with regard to explanatory power which in turn is relevant in determining which metaphysical view and theory of consciousness, whether physicalism (materialism), idealism, etc., is, in terms of reasons to believe what is true, is the superior view in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Simply put, explanatory power is a relevant factor in choosing our metaphysic and theory of consciousness. And to that end, it is relevant to point out that the hard problem of consciousness is not any way near being solved and appealing to complexity and/or life programming is not a way to any extent get around the hard problem of consciousness. This is a real disadvantage to materialism and emergentism that needs to be taken seriously and not be dismissed by crying god of the gaps.
It's disappointing that Tim Freke who is a Gnostic philosopher is also now arguing that Consciousness is an emergent property when as Kastrup correctly argues it is primary it was here first. Their polemic was explosive: ruclips.net/video/aaINNEwbBp8/видео.html
@@samrowbotham8914 I don't see how this relates to my above comment or the following comments to that initial comment, but yes I agree. It is dissapointing.
Bernardos point about Materialists needing to choose whether they believe the higher brain generates self perception or not really got me thinking. If higher brain activity is what generates self-perception, self aware experiences like NDEs which happen when the higher brain is “offline” are big questions indeed.
Not only the higher brain. Various studies of brainstem activity during cardiac arrest have shown that the lower brain (the brainstem) is also shut down. Basically, the whole brain is not there to generate these experiences.
1:30:40 My dad said he saw someone's head briefly turn into a skull once, he thought it was strange (of course) but thought no more of it. Then, a week later that same person died from being hit by a lorry... there's no way he could have smelt that he would be hit by a lorry. There is also a story of someone who signed off pilots going to battle in the second world war, where he knew the people who would die because he saw their heads as skulls. Again, you can't smell that, its not an illness that will affect them in the future, it's a physical event which happens in the future. It may in fact be synesthesia, but not by seeing smells, but seeing a different sense which may be dormant in a lot of people. Who knows. But it does certainly seem that the explanation is more complex than the sense of smell.
@@1234carlie Well Dr. Woerlee refers to it at 1:30:25, the timestamp in my post was wrong, that's what I'm responding to. The fact is those things happened. Maybe it was just a coincidence, and it was what Dr. Woerlee said, that its a form of synaesthesia, detecting an illness, and the people just happened to die in an accident before they died of the illness they had. Its kind of interesting but never seen it myself.
That’s really interesting. His senses give him an insight into future events. Time, from a higher dimension, is like space, so future events are already decided in some way. And, parapsychology shows that people can predict future events. Is he still around? Someone should conduct some studies on him.
@@DiogenesNephew lol, well, I'm summarizing what he told me, so I'm leaving some smaller details out. It's not like he saw their head turn into a skull, like a full transformation, with all blood all over it or whatever, but more like an x-ray of a skull, that their skull was slightly visible through their skin. At least that's how I understood it to mean. So he thought no more of it at the time because he thought he'd just imagined it.
Would it be possible to say everything is made of energy to be categorized into two types 1. undifferentiated energy and 2. differentiated energy so that our perception is the differentiated energy field; whereas the other is the underlying field of undifferentiated energy? Also, is it possible to say that consciousness is a characteristic of the undifferentiated energy field? And lastly can this undifferentiated energy field being outside time and space be interchangeable with the concept of eternity (not infinity) being something which does not classically exist and yet does exist?
before making any statements and classifications....I would suggest to check the scientific definition of energy. Energy: the capacity for doing work. All the rest you wrote is just new age bovine manure. Consciousness is an abstract concept of the quality of our ability to be aware of stimuli of the environment and our organism. Making up unfalsifiable fields and energies is a pseudo philosophical practice which is in direct conflict with our verified scientific paradigm. Advanced properties are not observed in fields or in carrier particles.(we only observe kinetic properties as energy in those scales) Complex structures are needed for chemical, biological and mental properties to emerge.
Materialism requires an absurd logical bootstrap for its very existence. On the one hand materialists deny naive realism. A materialist will be the first to admit that none of our conscious experience 'is' literally the external world. And yet, materialism cheats by treating mental experiences such as space and time as if they ARE literal one-to-one experiences of the external world. Materialism has to cheat in this manner....otherwise it has no handle on the external world whatever. But it means materialism is totally based upon circular reasoning and a bizarre bootstrapping that one is expected to overlook.
This is not correct characterization of materialism. Materialism just says that there are structures that persist regardless of the presence of mind; in effect, it merely says there is an external reality to observers. Idealism says that everything is mind. Both positions have limitations but the issues are mostly vocabulary. Idealism doesn't make sense because every example we have of mind is embodied in informational descriptions that are well-described in materialist terms, and if it's possible for a disembodied mind to exist we most likely couldn't interact with it anyway because immaterial things cannot affect the material as far as we can see (except for immaterial forces described by physics, which is, in fact, part of material reality). Again, every example we have of mind is, at the *very* least, intimately contingent on a material brain in crucial ways; we just have no examples of disembodied minds so we have no empirical evidence for their existence. This means that when we construct an empirical theory of mind we are absolutely forced into, at the very least, a partially materialist explanation. It does absolutely no good to say that we intuit that this can't be the whole picture, because the evidence is just what the evidence is and you have to make a theory based on evidence, not speculation, and the evidence we have is that minds come from, or at the very least, are intimately connected to, or rather, intimately dependent in at least some respects, bodies. And we have absolutely no clear evidence of something of "pure mind" affecting something material. And it's not like this isn't something empirical science can't test; all it would take is some sort of subjective phenomenon to be attested to by a subject that later causes a predictable change in material state. We never see this in the lab; it's always the other way around if it's not ambiguous: material precedes mental in predictable ways. The implication of this is that, based on current evidence, the "mind" is not separable from "the brain/body", and that's just something we have to deal with until we get evidence to the contrary. The implication, however, is that when an idealist says "reality is mind" it's as if they're saying "reality is mind and brain but without the brain", which just doesn't make any sense in explanatory terms because the idea of a mind without a brain is contrary to all empirical evidence. It's misguided to argue that materialism can't explain everything, and that we are therefore forced to confront idealism as true, because no good materialist should really maintain that they can, in fact, explain everything. Godel proved in logic and math that some things are not provable, the Munchhausen Trilemma should demonstrate to anyone's satisfaction that all statements of truth are either circular, infinite regress, or dogmatic, and Plato's Allegory of the Cave should strike anybody as a good metaphor for how all of reality is indeed a mere model of "the actual, real truth". All of these are legitimate points that force us to accept that subjectivity is part of any notion of reality that we ourselves are capable of conceptualizing. It would be easy to say that this means that because we have no constructions of reality that are not subjective we are forced by default to accept idealism as a self-evident truth. The problem is it's not clear what the value of this kind of idealist model of reality provides us; it's just simpler for us to think of the external world as a "real, persistent thing" that exists in spite of our being there, because multiple people can measure it and find out that it has, in fact, got these persistent properties that are no dependent on mind as we understand it. If you want to invoke some sort of subjectivity model for reality that is reasonable to me, but the problem is it needs to incorporate an element of materialist metaphysics as well and then create a new hybrid vocabulary from the two. Materialism has some trouble saying "all is material" and has to create special categories of immaterial reality (forces, for example, or "consciousness" that is "somehow material") and then mix these into its metaphysics. This is the kind of materialism that makes the most sense, because it simply realizes that mind may be fundamental to at least some aspects of reality in some way, but doesn't discount the empirical models we have generated. On the other hand, in so generalizing the property of "mind" to "all of reality", idealism sort of shoots itself in the foot because it's trying to draw on something we have no examples of: disembodied aspects of mind.
@@superdog797 Er...no...you've completely utterly missed the point. How do you even arrive at your 'external reality' in the first place, when science rejects naive realism and thus ALL you have to go by is subjective experience. My point was that every time 'external reality' is referred to, it is a cheat.....it is a reference to a naive realism that science itself argues is invalid. You cannot on the one hand argue that subjective experience has ZERO one-to-one perception of 'external reality'....and in the same breath reference 'external reality' as if it were some objective thing on par with naive realism. 'External' is as much a qualia as red or blue or the smell of cheese. You do not have the handle on 'external reality' that you think you have. It's a bootstrapped cheat making use of a smidget of naive realism.
@@superdog797 "Again, every example we have of mind is, at the very least, intimately contingent on a material brain in crucial way"..................this is ass backwards. Nobody has ever seen a 'material brain' other than via a mind. The one thing I am 100% certain exists is my mind. You speak of 'empirical evidence', but ALL you actually have is conscious experience. And as the blue of the sky and the sound of Mozart are qualia and according to science do not exist 'out there'......how do you know that 'out there' even exists out there ? The true basis of idealism is that space and time are as much qualia as the blue of the sky.....that is a far better way of seeing idealism. An idealist is simply removing all last vestige of naive realism.
@@superdog797 "idealism sort of shoots itself in the foot because it's trying to draw on something we have no examples of: disembodied aspects of mind."........circular reasoning based on starting with the a priori axiom of an external world. You need to actually arrive at that axiom first. Like you, I used to think that idealism was absurd....but when you really get into Kant, Schopenhauer, etc, you realise that 'external reality' starts to fall apart the minute it is argued ( as everyone accepts ) that the sky is not really the qualia blue that we perceive. One ends up having to ask whether even space and time are externally real or are themselves qualia. And if space is a qualia......what then happens to the whole notion of 'external' ?? Dare to have that thought !
@@peterstanbury3833 I understand exactly what you are saying and I in fact agree that there is no reality that we have direct access to that is not experiential reality. This is a trivial observation, despite the fact that people generally don't realize it until they are a little older. The question is what is the best *model* of reality for us to describe it: an idealist one, or a materialist one? Theories and models are meant to explain things, and they come with built-in assumptions. Relativity is the best model to explain the universe we live in, but it postulates (i.e. "sneaks in") two assumptions - completely unprovable and unconfirmable - that the speed of light is constant for all observers, and that the laws of physics do not vary based on frames of reference. Despite these being brute assumptions, the theory has implications and predictions that we observe to be correct. That's why it's the best theory, despite being incomplete in terms of absolute knowledge. I'm not saying materialist ideas can explain everything - they're just the best explanation out there, and they seem to make the fewest brute postulates. If the basis for your idealism is, in part, that all of the reality we have direct access to is experiential reality, and that you cannot construct inferences to a material-phenomena-as-real world because the very basis that stimulated that impulse was a "mental" one in the first place, then you similarly would have to discard the very presence of other minds themselves, because we have absolutely no access whatsoever to anyone else's immaterial world, and be left with solipsism. Solipsism is actually more consistent with an ultraskeptical position but I'm just not going to accept solipsism as a model for reality because I think there is a sense in which you really exist independently of me. Now, I understand, and might even be interested to know, that you or another idealist could provide some sort of explanation or framework for explaining reality in purely idealist terms, and it will always be possible for an idealist to retort to anyone who disagrees that "everything you said comes from your mind". I just don't see the use in such a rejoinder, have not seen any such vocabulary, and I don't see what idealism is going to teach us that is useful about the world. Idealism itself has serious issues because when it invokes the term "mind" it is already falling into vocabulary that is problematic for idealism. If you look around the world it makes perfect sense to postulate that mind is somehow either produced or at the very least "concentrated" by material constructions, and that "thought" does not occur apart from certain neurological processes. That is not a "provable" idea but it is a model that explains the data we see. Idealism just ignores all that and says "everything is mind", which if you think about it, actually dispenses with any explanatory power at all because any time you invoke an explanation that "everything is this one thing" you are actually explaining very little at all indeed. The absolute best model is probably some pseudo-mixture and/or novel combination of idealism and materialism, but that's a complex idea that I'm not sure most people have time to go into, and if they did, I don't see what they would benefit from it other than intellectual pleasure.
I agree with Bernardo on almost everything, however, when they were talking about NDEs, I don't understand why Bernardo said that the NDEs with accurate perceptions are implausible or not important, I disagree, maybe I'm misinterpreting his position on that aspect of NDEs but that's what I understood from what he said, or maybe he just has more interest on NDEs that have more focus on the transcendental.
Schopenhauer was also sceptical of near death experiences. Maybe it something to do with their intellectual stance disallowing unexplainable phenomena.
I don't think there has been any legitimate accurate perceptions found for NDE's - as Bernardo stated the NDE's reporting they floated above their body and saw their body and the room were re-creations by the mind to maintain continuity, like false awakenings with lucid dreams. This doesn't discredit NDE's though, they are still remarkable happening when brain activity is impaired or reduced, as it is under the effects of psychedelics.
@@DamienMcKinnon Pam Reynolds was verifiably not a recreational experience by the mind. She made accurate perceptions at a period when her EEG was flat.
@@pandawandas Pam Reynold's case isn't entirely convincing and can't be used as an example to irrefutably prove that she had true perceptions of the actual room while having zero brain activity. This is not to say she wasn't experiencing anything during this time, just that it was likely a re-creation of the room and not a true perception of floating above her body. I've had false awakenings while attempting to lucid dream where I think I've woken up - I've actually gotten up out of bed and gone to the toilet rather disappointed that I woke up and failed to have a lucid dream, only to wake up as I was about to pee and realize I was actually dreaming I woke up! The bedroom and bathroom were practically identical to how it normally is and felt incredibly real as I walked from my bed into the ensuite. This alone shows how powerful the mind is in creating an environment or a so-called "reality". I wasn't brain dead obviously, but we know already that reductions in brain activity can promote extremely rich experience, as is the case with psychedelics. Zero brain activity may still do the same, which is why I do not discredit NDE's and find them fascinating & worthy of serious scientific study.
@@DamienMcKinnon All of Pam's observations took place while her brain was in burst suppression (deepest anesthetic state that's possible, brain shut down from barbituric anesthetics) So the case is solid as it always has been.
A wonderful discussion between Dr. Woerlee and Dr. Kastrup. One thing I would take issue w/ with respect to Bernardo is his admitted bias towards the notion that personal agency ends with the death of the physical body. I would submit there's actually a considerable argument towards the idea that it doesn't, at least in the way that Bernardo describes. For example, it is a presumption to assert that the dissociation of the self that we experience here is a 1:1 to Ultimate Reality, which is to say that behind the world we experience is, in fact, the fundamental reality of universal consciousness. I'd submit that there's empirical evidence to suggest that this may *not* be the case. We see examples of this every day in multiple personalities; which from idealism's POV is an already dissociated mind itself giving way to further dissociations! A dream within a dream if you will. This is inarguable and prompts me to ask whether this is happening on an even grander scale. Who's to say that our physical selves aren't merely the dream avatars of a higher order consciousness that is itself still a dissociation of the universe? To argue this further, I'd also submit that NDEs (near-death experiences), as varied and subjective as they are, may be more akin to waking from a dream than the dissolution of personal agency. That's not to infer nor suggest that we take every NDE account at face value, but rather to look at the broad trends and see what we may be able to glean from them. For example: - One commonality is what so many have described as "spirit guides" or a "higher self". This speaks for itself, IMO. We very well could be communicating w/ our higher order consciousness, and what so many describe as being sent back or being told it's "not their time" could be interpreted as the purpose of the dream not having been fulfilled. - Following from the first is the commonality of pre-planning one's life. Some describe this as signing a contract. I'd submit that this could be the personal interpretation of our lower order consciousness (no offense intended) remembering our higher self's intent in inserting themselves into the dream. This, of course, would suggest that we're the manufacturers of our lives to an extent. - Another commonality is what so many describe as a barrier of sorts, a line (which can vary in form from the top of a hill to a door, etc.) that they recognize as a point of no return. From this POV, this takes on the meaning of fully waking from the dream and reintegrating w/ our higher self. Taken all together, I'd argue that none of this contradicts the basis of Dr. Kastrup's idealism. Rather it's an extension of that idea that, yes, consciousness is all that still fundamentally exists - but the scope of complexity that it takes could well be beyond the fairly simple version that he lays out.
The fundamental bases of reality is consciousness. How ever there are categories of consciousness. From this perspective we can perfectly maintained the main idea of idealism with out nullifying the sense of individual self. It seems that Bernardo kastrup avoids this, in fear of having to deal with implications on substance dualism.
@@yadurajdas532 In fairness to Bernardo, he has openly entertained the idea of different stratums of conscious identity - but he's not quite ready to embrace it yet out of his own admitted bias that it would lend towards the idea that individual suffering (a necessity for continued growth) doesn't end. Bernardo's gone into detail on how suffering *does* have meaning in how it reflects upon the individual and can foster personal growth - but that doesn't mean or enjoys it or relishes the thought that it could be an unending process. That aside, I'd argue that there are clear (albeit limited) observations that lend towards individual identity, in some sense, perservering after physical death. First is the simple observation that the physical body (or even just the brain) doesn't immediately vanish and/or dissolve after physical death and consciousness appearing to have gone. From Bernardo's POV, perhaps he might try to argue that the slow decay of the physical body is the *representation* of individual identity dissolving back into the universal mind - however the problem w/ this is the conflation of entropic time as it exists here w/ something that exists outside of time *entirely*. Bernardo discussed something similar along evolutionary lines in an interview w/ Donald Hoffman a while back. What's Bernardo's reasoning to think so in this context? Another observation follows from the first, and that's the observed phenomenon of terminal lucidity. For those unfamiliar, it's basically the occurence when a patient suffering severe brain damage from something like Alzheimer's or dementia is close to death and, for some reason, suddenly regains clear lucidity *despite* the damage to their brain in the days and/or weeks leading up to their death. Now this, IMO, is a bigger problem for Bernardo's view of death than the first. If we simply look at the brain as the representation of the dissociated identity, then there should be no room for a clearly damaged brain to suddenly regain lucidity. This is a clear contradiction. Again, in fairness to Bernardo, perhaps he might try to work his way around this by arguing on the issue of memory - and that memory, even if we don't quite understand how, isn't localized within the specific dissociated identity and that there are rare occurences where a person close to death can somehow tap into this memory to act like their old selves again. I have two problems w/ this. First is that it seems a tortured line of argument to suggest that a severely damaged brain that can't even communicate properly is going to have the capacity to do something like this. Second is that even *if* you grant the first (which I don't, but for the sake of argument), it would seem *highly* unlikely for it to persist as long as documented cases of terminal lucidity do. We're not talking about a few sparse minutes here. We've cases that have lasted for days or even weeks. One last observation (there are more, but this has gone on long enough already) is Bernardo's own lived experience. He himself has experimented w/ psychedelic drugs and confirmed an *expansion* of conscious experience despite a decline in actual brain activity. He's argued this specifically in debates w/ physicists! Now how, exactly, can we look at the brain as a representation of the dissocatied consciousness when even a brain that isn't close to death (as Bernardo's wasn't in his experiments w/ drugs) shows a clear decline in activity and yet he himself experiences a higher state of consciousness? This makes no sense.
@@ryanashfyre464 thank you for your reply sir. I just noticed it If you have a list of points like these in regards to BK work, I would like to see it if you will. I had watch a lot of material from Bernardo Kastrup, and remember noticing some inconsistencies in connection with his view on meta congnition and eternal self individuality, as you have mention, specially when he uses expiring base reasoning. Just curious to know, what is your philosophical stand ? dualist… idealist, a combination of both
@@yadurajdas532 W/ respect to the broad spectrum of Bernardo's work, I'd ask you to be specific in what you want me to respond to. I'm happy to do so as I did w/ regards to his views on physical death, but to try and sum up my views on his entire body of work in a YT comment is nearly impossible. That aside, w/ regards to my particular philosophical views, I hesitate to pin myself down w/ any single definition - but I'd lean towards *some* version of Idealism rn, but the devil's in the details and I want to try and keep myself open in that regard. My reason for that is both in Idealism's broad explanatory powers and simply the fact that its chief alternative, Materialism, has effectively ruled itself out as a serious alternative both in its diminished explanations for the world and even via our accumulated scientific evidence.
@@ryanashfyre464 thank you for your replay Sir. What’s your view on substance dualism. Some of the observations you have made on BK idea that individuality of the self disappears after death, will imply some sort of dualism. Will you subscribe to some kind of dualism within idealism or fundamental categories within consciousness. For example consciousness as a fundamental substance of reality, but not as a one single consciousness as BK conceives it, but rather as a conglomeration of individual units of consciousness?
Decades ago, as a child, before I even knew what idealism was, I encountered the arguments of Woerlee while I was looking for answers to big questions. Listening to him speak feels like watching a rerun of an old show. In the past he was heavily focused on combating substance dualism and supernatural interpretations of near death experiences. In this debate, it seemed like he wanted to bring some of those old arguments into play - such as his objection to the "reducing value". However, those arguments are not effective against a modern idealist.
Nothing can be against "modern" idealism ( or New Age Woo). Modern idealism is a pseudo philosophical, unfalsifiable , new age, death denying ideology. Nobody can falsify something that is designed to be untestable.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 Idealism is a well established, well defined ontology that has existed for hundreds of years. Yet here you are calling it a "pseudo-philosophy". Tell me, by what measure do you call idealism a "pseudo-philosophy", and do you extend that same logic to the other main contenders as well? Idealism is indeed unfalsifiable, but so is physicalism, dualism, and any other ontological position that deals with the nature of our reality.
@@anduinxbym6633 -" Idealism is a well established, well defined ontology that has existed for hundreds of years." -Yes this is a common misconception of what criteria are relevant for this evalution. The years of existence (fallacious Argument from Age) and how well a pseudo philosophical view doesn't make it an "established" academic view or even a philosophical one! -". Tell me, by what measure do you call idealism a "pseudo-philosophy", and do you extend that same logic to the other main contenders as well?" -Great question. In order for a view to be philosophical it needs to be founded on knowledge , not on supernatural presuppositions. The conclusion of the view must be a wise claim (philos+sophia) that helps us understand our world (or the phenomenon in question) allowing us to work upon and produce further knowledge and wisdom. Idealism like any other worldview(materialistic or not0 are just dry declarations that contribute nothing to our philosophical endeavor and our epistemology. They are wishful hot air about an unobservable, underlying reality that we can not investigate. They worldviews are by definition pseudo philosophy. -"Idealism is indeed unfalsifiable, but so is physicalism, dualism, and any other ontological position that deals with the nature of our reality." -Correct. The difference with the materialistic pseudo philosophies is that we can assumed them and work on that assumption (as if the material is all there is ) and really studying the world. Of course its a useless pretentious assumption. We don't know what we are aware is all there is. On the other hand,The problem with idealism is that we can not even "observe" this realm so its irrelevant. We can not work upon this assumption, produce knowledge or technical applications based on its principles....its Not even wrong.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 It comes as no surprise that you would open with a straw man. I never stated that the years of existence of a position _alone_ define the worth of that position - but the fact is, idealism has endured for as long as it has because it has withstood the arguments of opposing philosophers for centuries, and it will withstand your nonsense as well. It remains tenable to this day, and it is one of the major contending positions in this subject - the strongest one, in my opinion. You said: *_"In order for a view to be philosophical it needs to be founded on knowledge , not on supernatural presuppositions."_* That's a loaded word. When people think of supernatural, they think of spooky ghosts and witches, but here you are using the word "supernatural" in an entirely different way to encompass a whole category of philosophy - in fact, you are branding every tenable position that deals with the nature of reality to be supernatural "woo". You said: *_"The conclusion of the view must be a wise claim (philos+sophia) that helps us understand our world (or the phenomenon in question) allowing us to work upon and produce further knowledge and wisdom."_* Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It has existed for as long as humanity has, and has never been limited to science, as you seem to believe. You said: *_"They worldviews are by definition pseudo philosophy."_* If you look up the term "pseudo philosophy", you will see that it's a term applied to any philosophical idea or system which does not meet a set of standards. The problem is, there is no universal agreement on those standards. So, you are correct only because the term _"pseudo philosophy"_ has no clearly defined standards. In fact, any branch of philosophy could (by definition) be called a "pseudo philosophy" by somebody who creates their own set of "standards". The term "pseudo philosophy", loosely defined as it is, is by _definition_ nothing more than a fancy way of saying _"I do not respect this branch of philosophy."_ Well, thank you for your opinion on the subject.🙄🙄🙄 You said: *_"Correct. The difference with the materialistic pseudo philosophies is that we can assumed them and work on that assumption (as if the material is all there is ) and really studying the world."_* You can "assume" any of the contending positions, and go on to observe, test, and acquire knowledge about the world around you. They are all unfalsifiable and they are all founded in assumption. There is no difference in that regard. Materialistic philosophies are no more conductive to scientific progress than idealism is. You said: *_"Of course its a useless pretentious assumption. We don't know what we are aware is all there is."_* I do not find discussions about the nature of reality to be useless at all. Our world view is deeply intertwined with our human psychology, our thought processes, and our wellbeing. You said: *_"On the other hand,The problem with idealism is that we can not even "observe" this realm so its irrelevant."_* When you say it is irrelevant, what do you believe it is irrelevant to? To you, personally? Well, this subject matter is "relevant" to me and to many other philosophers who do find it to be a worthy expenditure of time. In fact, I would wager that it's "relevant" to almost everybody who delved into this topic, found this video, and watched it. To science? That's questionable. If a scientist adopts a founding set of ideals that tells them that certain phenomenon should be impossible, then they will choose to not investigate that possibility. On the other hand, if the world view of a scientist tells them that possibility could exist, they will be much more likely to choose to investigate it. If our world view can steer the path of scientific investigation, then can our world views truly be said to be irrelevant to science? You said: *_"We can not work upon this assumption, produce knowledge or technical applications based on its principles....its Not even wrong."_* I do not care whether or not scientific knowledge will be produced from metaphysical speculation. I still find value in this subject.
@@anduinxbym6633 -" I never stated that the years of existence of a position alone define the worth of that position" -Who told you that a fallacy is only when it is stated "alone"? You referred to that detail as if it would affects the validity of this faith based belief! -"but the fact is, idealism has endured for as long as it has because it has withstood the arguments of opposing philosophers for centuries," -That says nothing. Santa Clause has endured in our culture...what does that say for the truth value of that claim. Again logical fallacy. -"and it will withstand your nonsense as well." -ad hominem. Can you even post an argument without committing a logical fallacy? I guess if you could you wouldn't be an idealist. -"It remains tenable to this day, and it is one of the major contending positions in this subject - the strongest one, in my opinion." -For psychological reasons. People ease their existential and epistemic anxieties with death denying ideologies like idealism. The truth is that in Academic philosophy it is consider as pseudo philosophy. -"That's a loaded word. When people think of supernatural, they think of spooky ghosts and witches, but here you are using the word "supernatural" in an entirely different way to encompass a whole category of philosophy - in fact, you are branding every tenable position that deals with the nature of reality to be supernatural "woo". -Strawman. Supernatural is any claim that assumes the existence of properties or entities or agents non contingent to any physical structure which is in direct conflict with the current established scientific paradigm. So in short, the projection of mind properties in addition to Nature is a supernatural claim. -"Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It has existed for as long as humanity has, and has never been limited to science, as you seem to believe." - I defined what Philosophy is (Philos+sophia), what is the ultimate goal of this intellectual endeavor...not what it can be studied by this method. Again the argument from age is a fallacious and irrelevant. Aristotle was the first one who systematized logic and philosophy and the one who understood the role of Knowledge in Philosophy. Science was defined by him as the second fundamental step in the Philosophical method. A claim can never be accepted as wise if it isn't based on established knowledge. And wisdom is the ultimate goal of Philosophy. If you can not understand that you are wasting people's time claiming that supernatural claims are Philosophy. Knowledge always limits our philosophy mate. This is why we do philosophy...to understand what our current knowledge means for the things we don't currently know. Science is Philosophy on far better data (Natural Philosophy) and with a set of methodologies able to produce further knowledge. Most of magical thinkers don't have a clue about the relation of Philosophy and Science and the role of science in the scientific method.... -"If you look up the term "pseudo philosophy", you will see that it's a term applied to any philosophical idea or system which does not meet a set of standards. The problem is, there is no universal agreement on those standards. So, you are correct only because the term "pseudo philosophy" has no clearly defined standards. In fact, any branch of philosophy could (by definition) be called a "pseudo philosophy" by somebody who creates their own set of "standards" -Sorry but you are informed. Here are the main standards of what "qualifies" as pseudo philosophy. Pseudo philosophy is : 1.Philosophy that relies on fallacious arguments to a conclusion 2. Relies on factually false or undemonstrated premises 3. isn't corrected when noted. Idealism checks all three boxes. -"The term "pseudo philosophy", loosely defined as it is, is by definition nothing more than a fancy way of saying "I do not respect this branch of philosophy." Well, thank you for your opinion on the subject." -This is what pseudo philosophers and they followers want to believe since their ideology is a text book example of a pseudo philosophy. Claims on undemonstrated premises and fallacious arguments can never be wise(σοφία) so by definition ideologies that rely on them are pseudo philosophical. -"You can "assume" any of the contending positions, and go on to observe, test, and acquire knowledge about the world around you. They are all unfalsifiable and they are all founded in assumption. There is no difference in that regard. Materialistic philosophies are no more conductive to scientific progress than idealism is." -The problem with idealism is that the assumed conclusion of the ideology can not be observed or studied. The materialistic philosophies are just an unfounded generalization based on the foundings of Science. Idealism is just unfounded speculations about the underlying ontology of what we observe. At least materialism generalizes an observation even if this is indefensible.
Are inanimate objects just the external appearance of ‘thoughts’ of the underlying conscious substratum? Is that why there is so much consensus between the experience of different people? If you throw a ball, I can catch it. Is it because the ball is a ‘thought’ of the same universal consciousness, and because we are alters of that same underlying consciousness, this is why why our experiences coincide? Is that it? Or how else can we account for the fact that we all seem to be moving around in a shared world?
It doesn't seem helpful to consider consciousness without awareness. If there is no point of awareness to be experiencing the state (like you might be unconscious), then calling that conscuousness seems to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. Maybe a better term is needed that steers away from the terms "unconscious" and "conscious" used to describe brain states? Also, the language of "what it is like to be" also aludes to some kind of human like experience, even when applied to the sunflower example. We cannot be a sunflower, or escape our human experiences when thinking about what it might be like to be a sunflower. It's like saying there is something like to be a particle, where the interaction of internal and external forces cause various behaviour. It just seems like word games to support a theory and not a true explanation...
As I pointed out to Gerald years ago he cannot explain the Hidden Observer in fact up to then he had never heard of it. I am a hypnotist I know there is a part of us that never sleeps even when we are anaesthetized during surgery we have been warning surgeons to be careful what they say whilst the patient is lying there:local12.com/news/local/patient-sues-anesthesiologist-who-mocked-him-while-sedated
@@samrowbotham8914 thats very interesting! Would you call a hypnotic state a "conscious" state or an "unconscious" state? Does this part ("silent witness"?) that sticks around even when unconscious have its own memory, or does it add to our own memories? I still find the language around this, being conscious ( ego is aware) and unconscious ( ego is shut down) and then "consciousness" as a foundational aspect of reality misleading.
@Language and Programming Channel how are you defining the word "conscious" here? How would you compare "conscious" to "unconscious" (as in knocked out or in deep sleep). Are you using "consciousness" (the metaphysical prima materia) and "conscious" (being awake/aware) as having the same meaning? Becuase you used the words seemingly interchangeably in that sentence.
@Language and Programming Channel so you are talking about being aware of and responding to one's surroundings, as opposed to unconscious and being not awake and aware of and responding to one's environment?
As much as I love Kastrup and think many of his ideas are compelling, and Im more than open to idealism... It is very disheartening to me when I constantly hear him use psychedelic neuroscience to substantiate his idealist claims (leveraging the findings in his actual introduction no less). This is a great example of how, although it should be encouraged as much as possible, interdisciplinary thinking can go awry purely because the person has expertise in one field (in Kastrup's case, philosophy) yet is by no means one in the other fields (in this case, neuroscience). It also gives me a great deal of hesitation when I consider his words on psychiatry (e.g. MPD/DID) or quantum physics (e.g. wave function reduction) for the same reason. Ultimately, no neuroscientist researching psychedelic brain effects has any issue whatsoever with the results, or finds themselves having to contemplate any other model than materialism. David Nutt, the pioneer who started this inquiry in the UK at Imperial, did use Huxley's "Reducing valve" metaphor when discussing the original findings - but these were in 2012 when such initial results, showing psilocybin to reduce activity globally in the brain, where totally unexpected given the crude equation of more experience (i.e. positive symptoms e.g. hallucinations) means more neural activity. We've come a very long way in a decade, where this simpler fMRI lead to functional-connectivity MRI (fcMRI) recording inter-network dynamics, in turn leading to directed functional connectivity MRI which explores the causal influence of networks upon networks, and further to means of measuring the overall entropy or integrated information... What psychedelics do to the brain is decrease the activity of - and internal integration in - specific intrinsic networks, namely the Default-Mode Network (correlating to self-referential mentation) which serves as a central 'hub' of neural connectivity, resulting in 'desegregation' of global brain regions ultimately meaning a 'hyper-connected' brain state of circuits normally shielded from the influence of other circuits suddenly communicating in tandem. Thus, while certain regions of the brain may be disintegrated/lowered in activity, the critical nature of these regions means this effect causes, for want of a better word, *increases* in "activity" in the specific form of global connectivity. Given one highly promising theory of consciousness (in cognitive neuroscience) being that of 'integrated information theory', this hyper-connected state is precisely what accounts for this *expanded* state of consciousness. The more integration, the more conscious experience... If Kastrup were to acknowledge this, I'd be fascinated to hear his (perhaps revised) opinions. I do describe all this in my Seeking I interview with Darren here, if anyone's interested: ruclips.net/video/KgQXGS0X_1o/видео.html
The argument being made here is essentially that brain disorganization gives rise to psychedelic experiences. I suppose it could work under IIT, but not materialism. Materialism states that experiences are complicated brain activity, and you see none of that correlating with psychedelics.
Really, all you need is hard problem of consciousness and Hempel's dilemma. But we like to hear Bernardo dispelling ignorance so we stretch 1 minute to 1 hour. Why do mediocre-wits always focus straining out gnats and end up swallowing elephants? :P
I could have done without the scoliosis journey into the weeds, or Dr. Woerlee's irrelevant digression into the smell of schizophrenics! Apart from that a very interesting debate. Bernardo brilliant as usual! I would have liked the subject of reincarnation to have been brought up in the questions. Prof Ian Stevenson and Dr.Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia have done serious study on the validity of thousands of cases over 50 years. This would be a challenge to both men's views, it seems!
I'm not really responding to the comment above, but I think it was you who responded to my question about an objection to idealism according to which the argument from parsimony leads to solipsism. The response effectively was that we can, through inductive reasoning based on certain empirical observations, make a non-solipsist inference. To play devil's advocate, I think someone could just respond to that by saying that the relevant empirics could just be accounted for in terms of the imagination or mental processes of the only existing subject -- effectively dreaming up the empirics. And therefore, solipsism is still the most parsimonious view and has sufficient explanatory power. I have my own response to this, but if I remember correctly that you were addressing this is the chat, I'm curious how you'd respond to this.
@@highvalence7649 As Russell said : “As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it. I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.” I added at the end that it is more plausible to postulate something outside of our own subjective experience, but this doesn't need to invoke another ontological category that would be different from mind.
@@iwatochmyna9764 Thanks for your reply. Again, just paying devil's advocate here but, why would that be more plausible if solipsism can account for the relevant empirics and is more parsimonious than postulating something outside of our own subjective experience that is ontologically indistinct from mind?
@@iwatochmyna9764 That being able to account for the relevant facts and having an advantage in parsimony is not enough. Falsifiability is also a relevant criteria, and it is not falsifiable to claim that any given empirical evidence can be accounted for in terms of being dreamed up or imagined. But personally, I think if the arguments come down to those technical details that, at least to me, somewhat undermines the force of the parsimony argument which is why I also prefer other arguments, some of which parsimony is one of other relevant factors in determining the superior metaphysic which in my view is idealism. But I haven't seen Bernardo address precisely this which is why I asked the question. But when it occurred to me to ask it the convo was over.
Worker's comments on NDE'S were absurd and ridiculously dismissive. No one has ever explained why anyone would have an experience of connection with God as they are in a state of unconsciousness. Why would the biology of our body create this narrative? It is utterly absurd.
I knew from Woerlee's opening statement that he had not truly grasped Kastrup's ideas, and it was going to be an easy debate for BK. I could even tell from the expression on Bernardo's face (is that you got? lol) that he knew this as well. lol Woerlee seems like a good man though.
Why are so many people so willing to jump on an idea just because they think it’s interesting? Idealism is fun and all, but it’s not terribly scientific. It makes a lot of assumptions, where materialism makes the most accurate predictions.
_30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind._ _31. We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing._
Think about watching play in a theater and receiving the story in your mind...lets say the physical movement and the story happen together.....one is the mirror of the other.....the idea expresses itself as movement and the movement expresses itself as the idea. It is a dualism where one doesn't cause the other. It is a good start towards a panpsychist model of reality.
Dr Woerlee is wrong to assert that there is an issue with the transpersonal becoming the personal. There is an exact analogy ( it may even be the very same phenomenon ) of this in quantum mechanics. One can assign a wave function to a particle, but that wave function is also part of the wave function of the experimental apparatus, which in turn is part of the wave function of the world...and at the ultimate level a single wave function describes the entire universe. Thus this distinction into local and non-local already exists within physics, in fact right at the heart of quantum mechanics, and is not a conceptual impossibility.
Pete, forgive me but I'm completely confused. Every exchanged we've had on the various Facebook groups you've been very stringently defending the position that the brain produces consciousness... any suggestion I and others made against this was met with harsh opposition and dare I say ridicule. Has your position changed? If so would be interested in hearing why.
@@SeekingI I've generally always advocated Kant's transcendental idealism, and that one cannot extrapolate an objective external world from subjective qualia that one then claims do not exist in that external world. What you are referring to is completely different arguments about materialism vs 'non materialism'....and my point there has always been that 'non material' is akin to 'nothing' and that even an idealist has to suppose that the mental world is made of some sort of 'material'. So I do not think the argument between materialism and idealism is an argument between materialism and 'non materialism' at all and it is wrong to see it as such. Both sides have 'material'....the argument is over what sort of material it is and whether it 'depends' on mind or not.
@@SeekingI Various personal experiences have also changed my perspective. Deep, mystical meditative experiences that are extremely hard to describe so I generally don't.
@@peterstanbury3833 Why would 'non material' be akin to nothing? And when you say that 'even an idealist has to suppose that the mental world is made of some sort of 'material'', are you conceiving of the mental as necessarily ontologically distinct from the material that an idealist purportedly has to suppose makes up the mental?
@@highvalence7649 I'll answer your question by simply asking you to provide a single...even just one...example of anything that has absolutely no material substrate. That is surely the very definition of 'nothing'. I mean...a table is composed of some sort of material, whether it is physical or mental. What is a 'not table' composed of ? The very act of defining a thing is the act of assigning it a material status, as it is only the material difference between that and nothing that defines existence at all ! What properties does 'non material' have that distinguish it from 'nothing' ? Please list them. Somehow, for some bizarre reason, people have assumed that to be against materialism ( i.e physical realism ) one has to conjecture a 'non material' realm....as it sounds like it is the opposite of materialism. But the opposite of materialism is not 'non material'...it is 'nothing'. The REAL argument is between physical realism and idealism...and even Kastrup ( and Hoffman and others ) argues that the idealism world is composed of some sort of 'material'. Thus idealism is not, as many seem to believe, synonymous with non-materialism.
I Mr. Kastrup does not ask as to believe against evidence , I appreciate that and I have nothing against "metaphysical speculation. " But without evidence how are we to distinguish between metaphysics? For example Spinozist monism with both mind and matter as "attributes"( or even a postulated infinity of attributes) does just as well in my opinion. In addition, I think we have a more exhilarating answer to the question of "how a man should live " in Spinoza than in Schopenhauer. If I adopted Mr. Kastrup's outlook how would this change the way I lead my life?
@@Sam-hh3ryClaiming "explanatory power" bothers me. As Kant has pointed out the propension of human reason to understand the whole is louable. ( We know his answer) But how can we "explain" something like "universal consciousness " of which we don't have a hint of? I suppose it is permitted to be agnostic.
@@ruhdandoujon6310 Sure it is permitted to be agnostic, but let me add that in Katrup's ontology, consciousness is not what is to be explained, but things are explained by reducing them to consciousness. Consciousness just is (just as Deus sive natura for Spinoza).
One becomes attuned to the fundamental consciousness. Egofree, joyfull. Outlook change. As an idealist, this it IT. If you are looking for prescriptions on how to live, seek a man made god.
I think Dr Kastrup has covered how that works into his hypothesis. Take a look around his channel, I’m sure he has. It may have been this one: ruclips.net/video/RtOXx84aT-c/видео.html
@@SeekingI predictions of neurologists from the dream reading technology trump post hoc reasoning after the fact I would think. Its not that I dont understand the problem of underdetermination, its that I think that shows dr.kastrup's argument to be essentially an unfalsifiable and unnecessary addition to any already working hypothesis. Its the same as saying "god could have guided evolution". It adds nothing but post hoc logical possibility. Ive never seen him address this issue anywhere, and if he did, he would have a hypothesis with a prediction that we could test about consciousness. That would award him many acomplishments and would move science in the idealist direction. The fact that no such event has happened makes me highly skeptical that he adds any useful comprehension to our current understanding at all.
@@Hhjhfu247 everything ever understood by us has been physical. Energy is physical, quantum fields are physical....literally everything is physical. So unless you can show me HOW something non physical even can exist, physicalism is just another word for "things that we actually know exist"
There is no way to show how you get from.material processes to consciousness, what that imagery shows.is what the experience looks.like on a dashboard of measurement as he would say.
@@aal2206 oh I agree with that. I am only debunking his claim that idealism answers the hard problem because materialism can't in principle. This shows that materialism could in principle explain consciousness, but I completely agree that we do not actually understand that yet.
Kastrup makes unsubstantiated and false claims 1. The foundations of physics "evidence" says absolutely nothing about matter being "mental" or conscious. No physicist think that today. It simply says that we don't have a full picture. 2. The world does not "appear to us" as "qualities. When I look around what my visual system informs me about are precise surface properties, angles, orientations, curvature, distance, location, direction and speed of motion etc. These are quantitative measures of physical properties (physical qualities) like space and geometry not magical "qualities" that he claims to exist. 3. Every so called evidence for experiences taking pace in the absence of brain activity are directly explained by the fact that the subject has no way of knowing WHEN those experiences were generated.To ignore this point is deliberate misrepresentation or disqualifying ignorance. Brain activity does not return to normal instantaneously after coma or injury or hypoxia and the activity during the recovery period is the explanation for the reported experiences. As for psychedelics, he deliberately misrepresents the data. If you take into account direct electrophysiological recording of neuronal activity (as well as MEG data) you find that there is a profoundly disorganized activity pattern not simply "reduced" activity. SO: disorganized neuronal activity = disorganized experience. Wow, who would have thought? Not only does this not contradict but it directly supports the neuronal basis of experience.! 4. Finally the explanatory power of physicalism and idealism are not even remotely similar. If the brain is just the "appearance" of what my experiences are then he needs to tell how contemplating the "redness of red" as an experiential "quality" explains why the neurons that respond to color are in hexagonally arranged patches in the primary visual cortex, not to mention to explain that we have specialized red color responsive photoreceptor cells in the retina, or that there is a brain at all.... His "theory" is pure science fiction. As soon as you try to use it to actually EXPLAIN anything it becomes completely intractable or incoherent. It's a shame that in the 21st century people still fall for this nonsense. Then again the epistemic breakdown of society reached the level that people think that anything that the "establishment" says must be false, that there are no viruses, COVID was made as a bioweapon but it also did not exist, the earth is flat and that maybe 1x1=2. Jesus.
There you go we found Ellen Page.After İnception she began to ponder about existence and made enough money to leave the industry and start his journey to philosophical endeavors.
When a discussion starts without any definitions on the main concepts of the premise in question...you immediately know you are going to experience pseudo philosophy of the highest magnitude.
@@SeekingI Do not bother with that guy, he is just here to spam this comment section, push an agenda, and get the last word in every single thread to maintain the appearance of _"winning"._ I have clashed with him for years.
Dr.Kastrup is yet to understand that he's assertion "objective properties" is a strawman erected agaInst the assertions of staunch materialism (Nominalism): Properties are awarenesses = observed-nesses = IMAGINARY properties are NO-thing = not existing - made up, from/about SOME-thing = existing - ascribed, assigned, attributed TO some-thing. "Properties are invisible TO the eye" "Properties ARE IN the eye" A so called measurement of a measurable property = parameter in the language of Physics is but a useful assertion = objectization = quantities, valutas, {OF=FASKING} the property. The objectivity of the property is FAKED by the assertion of a societal agreement. The mind or human conciousness it is the individual entirety of properties = NO-thing momentarily being fabricated Iow the mind is NO-thing = does not exist The "basic consciousness" is the awarenesses=properties made up from all that is immediately around the brain i.e. the own body.
-"The objectivity of the property is FAKED by the assertion of a societal agreement." -Objective can only be a claim that is in agreement with current facts about a property. i.e. the claim "a brick wall is solid and won't allow us to pass through it" is an objective claim about an observable fact. No type or societal agreement can change the objective value of a claim describing observable facts of a property. So by having all the above in mind....properties can be describe by facts that are accessible to everyone...so those facts are objective making our claims about those properties objective.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 All that you DO describe, it is the object. You ascribe, assign, attribute properties to it. In any case, the property is imaginary, and the assertion !!!OF!! the property is deemed TO BE objective - but by people with some brain in their evolved-primate skulls. We assign solid-ness/ impenetrablity to the wall for the reason that we cannot pass through it. *The wall as such causes that we cannot pass* It is NOT an entity called solidness which causes that we cannot pass. Peace!
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Someone really needs to try to give Bernardo Kastrup more publicity. I'm sure even one debate with any of the intellectual celebrities like Sean Carroll or Sam Harris would be enough to get him the attention he deserves.
I personally would like to see him debate with the fantastic Roger Penrose. Apparently they did come together on e time but the video is not available. By the way do watch the recent video of Brian Green with Penrose to see why science fascinates and not so much metaphysics.
I facilitated his interview with EBTV check them out. I want to see him go head to head with Roger Penrose or Richard Dawkins et al
Several years ago we debated Worelee over on Amazon I asked him a question about the Hidden Observer and he took a week to come back with a spurious load of bloviations which was risible.
@Sassan
There's no need to give quackery and Idealistic nonsense more publicity. It looks like most people know Idealism is quackery and whacked out garbage.
@@Dhorpatan How
@@pandawandas
(sigh) How what?
To be honest, massive respect to Dr Woerlee - most materialists scoff at these ideas, but he was happy to have some fun and think about it and play with the idea. What a champ!
And Kastrup was great as usual!
Kastrup was great? with what his undefined terms describing vague deepities about streams and whirlpools and magical substances consisting what we register in our Cataleptic impressions?
@@nickolasgaspar9660 Or you're out of your depth and having trouble understanding - which is fine too because this topic is hard!
@@homelander-enjoyer That is not an argument. That is a way to avoiding facing the problems of an unfalsifiable worldview!
Kastrup never defines the term "consciousness" or its ontology. It just talks about streams and whirlpools..and absolutes..
His claims are not based on knowledge and his conclusions are not testable. This is pseudo philosophy.
He cherry picks the content in our conscious states that allows him to presume the idea he needs to prove.
So the issue here is not if I have trouble understanding Kastrup's pseudo philosophy but if most of you in here understand what Philosophy is and what is the method and applications of it.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 *_"You said: We have zero contribution by Idealism in our Scientific Epistemology ...and that is a huge problem for those who support such useless ideologies."_*
We do not decide the truth value of a statement by how useful that truth is to us, and I believe that arriving at truthful statements is its own reward.
*_"You said: That is not an argument. That is a way to avoiding facing the problems of an unfalsifiable worldview! "_*
There are no logical problems with the view that Bernardo has taken. It is perfectly tenable, parsimonious, and compatible with everything that science has observed.
*_"You said: Kastrup never defines the term "consciousness" or its ontology. It just talks about streams and whirlpools..and absolutes.."_*
Actually, he has defined consciousness and mind -- he has taken mainstream idealist definitions of the words.
*_"You said: His claims are not based on knowledge and his conclusions are not testable. This is pseudo philosophy."_*
His claims are based in logic and reason, and his conclusions logically follow. There is no universally accepted set of standards for the term _"pseudo philosophy",_ and every usage of the term is highly contentious. Loosely defined as it is, you could call any branch of philosophy _"pseudo philosophy"._ So, your usage of the term amounts to nothing more than a fancy way of saying _"I do not like your philosophy"._ Here are the facts - all mainstream dictionaries, the vast majority of philosophers, and the vast majority of people on this planet consider metaphysical answers to the question _"what is the nature of reality"_ to be the territory of philosophy. In fact, I would wager that the very first thing that most people think of when they hear the word _"philosophy"_ are the big questions that cannot be answered through direct observation. So, into the trash your opinion goes!
*_"You said: He cherry picks the content in our conscious states that allows him to presume the idea he needs to prove."_*
There is something it is like to be me. That is the direct fact of existence. Unlike the direct fact of existence, which certainly exists, the idea that there exists physical non-conscious _"stuff"_ can be doubted. So, it is not _"cherry picking"_ to place the direct fact of existence above physicality. It is actually more parsimonious to explain things in terms of the direct fact of existence than it is to explain them in terms of non-mind!
*_"You said: So the issue here is not if I have trouble understanding Kastrup's pseudo philosophy but if most of you in here understand what Philosophy is and what is the method and applications of it."_*
I know what philosophy is. It is you who has trouble, as the narrow vision of philosophy that you have is at odds with all mainstream dictionaries, the vast majority of philosophers, and the vast majority of people on this planet.
@@anduinxbym6633 well done sir 👏🏼
Bernardo Kastrup will charge the modem world I believe he is on something big. Good work guys
I agree. I believe Bernardo is the most important philosopher of our time, it is exciting to see how things develop. His notion of reality is clear, deep, reasonable and by far the best option on the table.
what is he saying that Aristotle or Hegel didn't already say?
It's standard idealism. An old, venerable philosophical position. Extraordinary thing, ignorance, ain't it. And idealism is either solipsistic or a god-of-the-gaps argument. Castro is in the former camp. Reality is 'subjectivity'. Ask him how he can be objective about that 😂
@Fosmea he's not a philosopher. In fact, he fares pretty terribly against actual philosophers. He's an idealism fundamentalist, much like a religious fundamentalist.
A likeable and soft discussion, much different than many debates you see these days. A respectful exchange of positons. When can we see the next round?
Not certain as of yet, will be sorting this out with both Drs soon :)
@@SeekingI great!
@@SeekingI Three years ought to be "soon" enough, one would imagine...?
What a pleasure to see two gentlemen debate with full respect for each other's ideas! Let us be advised that the age-old materialism-idealism debate will not be resolved or go away anytime soon...
unfortunately they are both arguing in favor of their pseudo philosophical positions.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 What happens to be your stance on the matter then? Ha ha -- matter
@nickolasgaspar9660 they're well established philosophical positions. Wtf are you talking about? There are others. Advance another, not your own ignorance of philosophy.
This wasn't a debate this was Kastrup teaching a student
teaching pseudo philosophy...
@@nickolasgaspar9660 yes because a doctorate in philosophy is clearly pseudo philosophy.
@@lioneye108 No, a degree doesn't ensure the quality of metaphysics.
The quality of metaphysics is defined by the epistemic connectedness between the expressed views and the available objective facts (and whether we can falsify those views).
Now degrees in philosophy only tell us that the guy is trained in Chronicling(he is aware of philosophical ideas of the past and present and he knows who coined them).
They don't guarantee us the quality of his reasoning or if his scientific knowledge is up to date.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 science and philosophy are not the same thing. Don't get them confused (Even though he has a science doctorate too and published many top articles for scientific American). I think the only problem here is that you don't like his philosophy. But you clearly haven't studied his work or know much about him. Calling him a pseudo philosopher is a bit like calling hawking a pseudoscientist. Its just a bit silly really.
@@lioneye108-" science and philosophy are not the same thing."
-Correct, Science (Natural Philosophy) is the best way to do philosophy.
When we have data we do Science When we don't we do philosophy.
To be fair Philosophy is the main tool and Science is the 2nd most important step in The philosophical Method (defined by Aristotle: 1. Epistemology 2. Physika(science) 3. Metaphysics 4. Aesthetics 5. Ehtics.6. Politics)
-"(Even though he has a science doctorate too and published many top articles for scientific American)"
-In reality and to be precise, there isn't such a thing as a "science doctorate"(but I get what you are saying). All philosophers and scientists are awarded Phds (doctor philosophiae) so he has a Philosophical Doctorate on a specific scientific field.
That doesn't ensures the quality of his metaphysics if his philosophical principles are not those of Methodological Naturalism(which aren't), if his scientific knowledge is outdated or ignored(both are true) and his reasoning is based on unfalsifiable pressumptions.
_" I think the only problem here is that you don't like his philosophy."
-Again we agree. I don't like his philosophy, not due to any personal bias, but because it is really bad philosophy! He ignores our Scientific epistemology, He ignores the real role of any philosophical framework (produce wise claims about the world based on current knowledge) He ignores the common usage of words and avoids giving clear or any definition of the terms he uses. He is a really bad philosopher but I love his personal channel on 8bit machines...I am subscriber!!!!
-"But you clearly haven't studied his work or know much about him."
-Unfortunately for him...I have and I have verified his bad practices in his philosophy.
-"Calling him a pseudo philosopher is a bit like calling hawking a pseudoscientist."
-lol not really. Hawking metaphysical hypotheses are based on what we know now and what the laws as we know them can produce beyond our limits of investigation.
Kastrup, ignores the latest Neuroscience and produces ideas that are untestable and outside our Cataleptic Impressions. Its like me telling you I am rich because I have a giant diamond hidden under the surface of Zeus's 50th moon. To be clear, I think Materialism does the same thing with less risk by still the claim is unfounded.
There is a huge difference in their metaphysics sir! can you see it?
I am a skeptic when it comes to ESP. But I have huge admiration and respect for Bernardo. I find his philosophy very interesting and admittedly, despite being biased towards Materialism (but not a full blown materialist), I can rarely disagree with anything he says. He is very thorough and careful with words. I love his rigour. Now ESP anyone know of any good experiments done that show signs ESP may be possible? I cant come across any. Any links or resources would be much appreciated. I am fully aware of the replication issue in these, like most psychology/social experiments
Yup, look into the Dean Radin experiments. I recommend checking out his book Real Magic Modern Science as well.
Or check out DOPS at University of Virginia, and their associated papers.
Remote viewing research shows the anomaly exists within a probability range of 4 to 7 sigma. Higgs Boson research was awarded the Nobel at 5 sigma. The results of this research is supported and backed by the American Statistical Association. They have been around since 1851. Jessica Utts was the director of the ASA at the time she backed this research at that level of probability. If you are skeptical you should do research. There are people who have honorary badges from several police departments for solving crimes. It's worth putting time into to understand it better. There is a collective consciousness at large.
I wish Bernardo had been given the opportunity to respond to Dr. Woerlee's defense of the materialistic answer to the 'hard problem of consciousness.' To me, that was the elephant in the room in this entire debate, yet he was not given a chance to set forth his objections to materialist position directly. The two of them could have spent the entire hour discussing this issue alone.
With all due respect to dr Gerald Woerlee, it's about time materialists realized they have been chasing their tails for quite a long time. It's time to think outside the box. I'd love to see more researchers studying Bernardo's position which could bring lots of new advancements to many areas of knowledge.
How can an unfalsifiable worldview can ever bring new advances to knowledge???? that a new one!
Idealism makes claims for the unobservable, underlying nature of reality which lies beyond our Cataleptic Impressions and all our current methods of investigation.
Idealistic claims are not based on knowledge, thus they can not be wise, so they can never help us expand our understanding for our world or even inform any of the rest of our philosophical branch(ethics, politics epistemology).
Its an epistemically useless death denying ideology and nothing more.
Its a declaration of what some people belief IF they decide to ignore what our impressions record about the world.
No real philosophical value in this idea.
@@nickolasgaspar9660
It is notfalsifiable.Just prove that matter or anything physical exist without Consiousness..So far no experiment has proven it .Infact to the contrary the reverse is getting proved (Check Alain Aspect).
Regarding using Idealism in Science,It is not that difficult.Infact Science is just a extension ..
@@SB-wu6pz You are trying a rhetorical game about the symbol "to exist"
I can play that game too and define: To exist symbolizes = means "to cause" = to have react
Someone observes a slut = their brain reacts: It fabricates, from/about the slut,
the property=abstract asserted as beauty.
Someone else observes the same slut and their brain fabricates, from/about the slut
the property=abstract asserted by the muscles of assertion, reactzing to the brain: As "ugliness."
*The momentarily-being properties=abstracts (imaginary) are the elements of one's consciousness (imaginary). Iow the consciousness is individual, it is the properties=abstracts being made up in an individual brain, momentarily.*
The consciousness is, like its possible elements the properties=imaginaries,
imaginary-non-causal = epiphaenomenal,
rather than real = causal.
Dr.B.Kaastrup's rhetorical trick is to boldly assert, that
- rather than the brain, the consciousness be very real,
and it be observing the very real namely the properties called beauty and ugliness.
Although literally every child knows:
- the property is invisible TO the eye
- the property is (ONLY!) IN the eye
Dr.B.Kaastrup is a veeery smart deceiver, but by he's own admission that the brain and all that is outside the brain are material he, unbeknownst to himself, settles the case, agains he's further assertions, erecting an edifice of lies, laid down in 7 books. This is outrageous (to me, you know, at this point that outragedness is IMAGINARY, does technically NOT exist is just epiphaenomenal)
@@SB-wu6pz "Just prove that matter or anything physical exist without Consiousness."
-Sure......if you explain what do you mean by this entity you call Consciousness!
-"So far no experiment has proven it ."
-No experiment? I can deprive you from all your sensory systems so your awareness is dramatically limited...or even better render you unconscious and put you in a car and put your feet on the accelerator. Do you think that reality will make you a favor and drive without interacting with anything physical?
-"Infact to the contrary the reverse is getting proved "
-What is the reverse???
-"Regarding using Idealism in Science,It is not that difficult.Infact Science is just a extension .."
-The metaphysical Principles of Idealism offer zero epistemic or predictive power...its like a god hypothesis that exists at a realm that doesn't make any sense or has an affect in our lives. ITs an unfalsifiable pseudo philosophical worldview which is irrelevant to our philosophy or science. We can not work upon this hypothesis and produce wise or epistemic claims about reality. Its a useless new age type of religion.
@@kleenex3000 The problem with KAstrup's claims is that, he cherry picks specific things among a wide variety of contents in our Conscious States. The same mechanism that enables us to be aware of the physical world also let us know that we have the ability to be aware. So our conscious states inform us for our mental impressions (Able to be conscious, able to reason, able to produce thoughts and have dreams) but also inform us for our Physical Impressions(our car, wife, table, chairs walls). SO our conscious states can only work within our Cataleptic Impressions and have no clue whether the things register by them have a different ontology from what they display.
HE promotes a meta-ontological ideology that goes beyond our Cataleptic Impressions, promoting an unparsimonious and unfalsifiable mental ontology for our Physical Impressions.
Kastrup is clever. He dresses up a death denying ideology in a "philosophical" robe and use it to ease people's existential and epistemic anxieties. Easy money, this is what religions have being doing for ages.
What a fascinating discussion! So amazing to see 2 different people with different opinions coming together and sharing their perspectives with respect. Doesn’t get much better than this.
You can tell Woerlee is impressed with Bernardo.
that doesn't change the pseudo philosophical nature of both positions...
Many people have told Gerald that his claim that people who have NDE's are hallucinating them does not stand up to scrutiny, people come back with veridical information which is corroborated by others so it's not anecdotal. Furthermore, scientists love to use labels by claiming its a hallucination they have not explained anything they just labelled it.
Actually that's not true. The current best studies on NDEs show that the incidences of veridical information from NDE patients who somehow "should not have known that info" is so low that it cannot be considered anything but anecdotal. Furthermore, there are never any smoking gun examples, like naming the sequence of numbers or the hidden picture (not that I'm aware of). The point is that NDEs should be massively corroborated and easy to verify if they were in fact examples of disembodied mind traveling around the material world and picking up information the body could not know; it should be happening all the time. Instead, it happens that, something like taking hundreds or thousands of cases, the only meaningful analysis can be conducted on fifty or two hundred cases, and of those cases, only one or two reported veridical information. It's too low to be considered evidence for out of body experiences.
@@superdog797 Are you aware of the book _The Self does not die_ by Titus Rivas. Its main theme is all about the veridical perceptions & they document 100s of cases in there. If you are aware then comment why you think these _veridical perceptions_ are invalid. Im curious to know criticisms of it as Ive had my doubts but am willing to believe many veridical accounts are valid testimonies.
@@Yameen200 If it's not empirical then it's not actually veridical - it's anecdotal. Empirical means we can conduct an experiment in which a predictable outcome occurs, and that is precisely what nobody ever gets in empirical NDE studies.
Just think about it. If, at death, people actually float out of their bodies, or read someone's mind, or whatever the supposed claim is that would be impossible, then any time you make a random selection of individuals and establish a criteria you are looking for (how often did they guess the hidden image right? how often did they describe the secret image or word in the hidden envelope? how often did they name the object that was out of view?) you should get not only a set of "hits" that is greater than chance, but upon repeating the experiment over and over again and the data set increases there should be, according to the law of large numbers, a formula that describes the aggregate distribution of probability of getting a "hit" in any case. Thereby, you would develop a statistical model of how often an NDE would reveal something that is "impossible". If NDEs represent paranormal phenomena that are "legitimate", then this should be very simple to do because any time you run an experiment you should get reproducible data. That's just basic science fundamentals.
Instead, we never get that. NDE studies always come up short. Nothing better than chance, or they never identify the hidden image or number, etc. - the criteria are never met. That is evidence consistent with hallucination. Doesn't mean something more isn't going on - just means there's no evidence. If you're aware of any empirical evidence I'm open-minded, but anecdotal evidence is problematic in too many ways.
@@superdog797 Well I take it you are a hard advocate of empiricism or leaning towards scientism. I presume you classify the _research_ by these individuals involved in NDEs as pseudoscience? I guess at the end of the day it depends what type of epistemology or evidence you consider most valid & which will then impact your conclusions.
I don't think these NDE studies claim that their results are something you can obviously replicate over & over. Not to mention many of these researchers ie sam parnia for instance complain of the lack of funding as well as the fact that attempting to track every patient during emergency situations for NDE verification would have ethical difficulties. There are presentations of that book which mention various anecdotal cases as well as an interview with the author by seeking I. You can find it here. Make what you will of it. pseudoscience or not it would be highly small-minded to ignore such cases unless everybody is in on a huge conspiracy of deception or all these cases are mass cases of schizophrenia. Of course i have some doubts that perhaps their methodology is flawed highlighting their own cognitive biases but nevertheless perhaps check it out before refuting it ?
ruclips.net/video/djEe3Diq_YM/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/AUFc8zFikMs/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/2qJ5UGbBGhg/видео.html
@@Yameen200 They may not claim that they can replicate them over and over but if it's a real phenomenon then that's what would happen: it would happen over and over again. What would it otherwise mean to say that "NDEs are real paranormal events"? You're saying that it *won't" happen over and over again? Or are you saying it *will* happen over and over again and that this recurring pattern of phenomena is what NDEs *are* ? If it doesn't happen over and over again then it's not a "phenomenon" - it's just something that (might have or might not have) happened in the past a certain finite amount of times and since you're saying it won't happen over and over again it will not happen again, so it can't be studied, so nobody can make any epistemic claims about them as a phenomenon, which is the same thing as saying "it won't happen again and therefore there's no difference in the future if these events don't happen at all anyway".
The whole point is that scientific method is not biased against *any* phenomenon whatsoever - it just says we can study those things we can study, and that's it. I'm not a believer in "Scientism" like someone else believes in "theism" or "realism" or "anti-realism" - I just look at the plain fact that scientific method produces reliable knowledge, and everyone else is just guessing. Some of them, some of the time, are going to land on the correct idea by chance, but the vast majority of them will just be wrong...because they have no reliable methodology. So why listen to them? Use the methods that are reliable.
I don't ignore any cases - I've looked into this over a long period in my life and a persistent pattern has emerged that has allowed me to develop a heuristic that this category of claim is basically "bullshit". It just saves me time because I don't have to go investigating every single claim over and over again because eventually you see the pattern emerge that they are, in fact, "bullshit" - there's no good evidence. Nevertheless, I do, as part of healthy skepticism, remain totally openminded on the matter, and periodically re-evaluate my views and the current claims on the matter. Always turns out the same way - no evidence is no evidence. I have no significant bias against the idea - if there's empirical evidence I'll be happy to say "yea, there's something to that". Until then, there's no reason to assume there is.
NDEs are not an example of mass schizophrenia or deception - they're just hallucinations, plain and simple - that hypothesis is consistent with all the empirical evidence available to us (that I'm aware of - is there some I'm not aware of you think is relevant?). Why should we therefore think that there is something more to this when we have a perfectly good explanation that is consistent with how we know the world works - hallucination. I myself have had vivid hallucinations that were total out of body experiences - it was a hallucination. I myself have woken up from dreams - more than once - where I had assumed an avatar within my dream world that lived a lifetime of memories of hundreds or thousands of years, had family, unique identity, no knowledge of my Earthly body, and a life as an alien being - massive time distortion - all constructed by my brain in the course of either seconds, minutes, or hours in the night while I was dreaming. I woke up with the experience fresh in my mind and unable to get a grip on the real world for a few minutes, nearly mourning the fact that my avatar world was not "the real world" because it had seemed so real while I was in it, so much so that when I awoke, it took me a few minutes to come back to reality and remember who I really was. This is just what the brain is capable of and it's just hallucination. I know even in my experience it had to have been hallucination for many reasons, not the least of which was that, in retrospect, there were elements from the dream world that I had seen in real life - my brain created that reality from prior elements in the real world - it's not like my "consciousness" "actually" inhabited some other alien lifeform when that happened. This is simple and sufficient explanation, and NDEs are readily explained in similar ways.
I will look at the links you provide, but I think it's important to realize how bad our intuitions when it comes to distinguishing between an event that is "just a weird coincidence" and "some event that represents a hidden, paranormal event" - especially given that the human brain evolved to overdetect agency. You have to come to grips with - realize - that this weakness in human cognition makes empirical method one of, if not the only, reliable method of establishing common knowledge we can all agree on. Even if there is other knowledge some happens to have and they can't demonstrate it to us in a reliable way that's just too bad - we're just up the creek without a paddle and you can't found an epistemic system of knowledge on those ways of thinking because they're not reliable and then we're just at the mercy of any crazy assertion that we choose to believe. I'm even sympathetic to weird metaphysical notions about reality but suspend judgment until I see the evidence. When I was a kid for years I was fascinated with paranormal activity, pseudoscience claims, had an open mind, looked into a bunch of them, etc., and over the years of my adolescence just saw, one by one, that they were all bullshit, systematically shaving away layers of a view of "maybe this could be true", until eventually there was so little left that I just can't take it seriously anymore when I first hear about claims that fit into those categories. I'm not closed minded about any of it - I just recognize that that way of thinking is overly credulous. That's all. And if at the end of the day anyone sees this about me and says "You're just biased" that's perfectly fine! Go out, establish some relevant evidence that actually counts, and my personal bias won't be relevant anymore. I doubt you'd even disagree that anecdote isn't good evidence, would you?, so why do you think it would be relevant in the context of NDEs, especially given the peer-reviewed, empirical literature on the subject that always turns up jack-diddley? Why is it so hard to just suspend judgement and call a spade a spade?
Woerlee addressed the hard problem with the standard answer of 'consciousness emerges at a certain level of complexity'. A standard reply to that is that it appeals to magic. I am not sure about that but I think the important point is that appealing to complexity doesn't solve or get around the hard problem because what still hasn't been explained is how, by virtue of complexity, consciousness emerges or is produced. One has just introduced one potential way in which consciousness can be thought to emerge or be produced but one hasn't gotten any way near solving the hard problem.
But I’m not sure how the part about life programming is thought to explain consciousness as a product of brains and bodies. Is the idea just that life programming of a certain type together with complexity produces consciousness? If so, then the same problem applies: one has just introduced one potential way that consciousness can be thought to be produced without explaining how, by virtue of life-programming of a certain type together with complexity, consciousness emerges or is produced.
Well thats the basic assertion : The more complex life became the more likely consciousness would be needed thus it will eventually emerge. The future of science will solve this problem through some fancy quantum neuroscientific principles & thus consiousness will be able to be duplicated/uploaded/quantified. So thats the 2 camps we have. One says science will solve it & its a god of the gaps & the other says it cant be solved bcoz mind was always eternal & uncaused.
@@Yameen200 The point with my initial comment is that appealing to complexity and/or life progrsmming does not constitute anything like a solution to the hard problem or any way of escaping facing the hard problem contrary to what some people seem to think.
>>”Well thats the basic assertion : The more complex life became the more likely consciousness would be needed thus it will eventually emerge.”
I understand that that is an assertion that is being made. There are all kinds of assertions made about all kinds of things. That’s a trivial point. But you obviously don’t think it is trivial. Otherwise you wouldn’t have written this. So, I must be missing your point with this remark.
>>“The future of science will solve this problem through some fancy quantum neuroscientific principles & thus consiousness will be able to be duplicated/uploaded/quantified. “
Either this is just an anargued assertion, the point of which I fail to realize, or it is begging the question because to assert that science will solve the hard problem in the future assumes that consciousness is a product of physical facts about brains and bodies which is the very thing that’s in question in this context.
>>”So thats the 2 camps we have. One says science will solve it & its a god of the gaps & the other says it cant be solved bcoz mind was always eternal & uncaused.””
Who is purportedly performing a god of the gaps and what is the reason for thinking that it is a god of the gaps?
@@Yameen200 I also feel like I have to address the point about an alleged god of the gaps. I’m not sure what you mean but I feel like I must address what I assume you mean because such an allegation regarding commiting a god of the gaps fallacy is so common and such a stupid point IMO that I need to say something about this.
So, if you meant to eco one of the standard materialist/emergentist talking points that when dualists and idealists appeal to the hard problem of consciousness which is the problem for materialists and emergentists, etc. to explain how and why, on the view that consciousness is product of physical facts about brains and bodies, the physical produces or results in facts about phenomenal consciousness, then they are appealing to an as of yet unexplained problem regarding consciousness on the basis of which they conclude god’s existence or the existence of some other non-biological minded or conscious being. In effect, this can basically be captured as ‘science doesn’t understand consciousness in physical terms, therefore God, or cosmic consciousness did it’ or something like that. I hope that’s a fair steelman.
Now, the problem with this objection is as follows: Firstly idealists aren’t necessarily arguing for god’s existence. So therefore, technically speaking, accusations leveled at idealism broadly regarding god of the gaps is just a non-starter. However, the objection can still be that idealists often make an argument that’s structurally equivalent or similar to a god of the gaps by instancing say a didit fallacy according to which ‘something happened. I don’t know why. Therefore, X (e.g. God or cosmic consciousness) did it.’ However, this is not the type of argument to which idealists appeal with regard to the hard problem of consciousness. The argument is not that because there is no sufficient physical account of consciousness, cosmic consciousness exists. Rather, the main point that’s being made (and this is the key point!) is this: The failure of the view according to which consciousness is a product of physical facts about brains and bodies to account for consciousness in physical terms is a relevant point with regard to explanatory power which in turn is relevant in determining which metaphysical view and theory of consciousness, whether physicalism (materialism), idealism, etc., is, in terms of reasons to believe what is true, is the superior view in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Simply put, explanatory power is a relevant factor in choosing our metaphysic and theory of consciousness. And to that end, it is relevant to point out that the hard problem of consciousness is not any way near being solved and appealing to complexity and/or life programming is not a way to any extent get around the hard problem of consciousness. This is a real disadvantage to materialism and emergentism that needs to be taken seriously and not be dismissed by crying god of the gaps.
It's disappointing that Tim Freke who is a Gnostic philosopher is also now arguing that Consciousness is an emergent property when as Kastrup correctly argues it is primary it was here first. Their polemic was explosive:
ruclips.net/video/aaINNEwbBp8/видео.html
@@samrowbotham8914 I don't see how this relates to my above comment or the following comments to that initial comment, but yes I agree. It is dissapointing.
great conversation thank you, helped my learning a lot.
Bernardos point about Materialists needing to choose whether they believe the higher brain generates self perception or not really got me thinking. If higher brain activity is what generates self-perception, self aware experiences like NDEs which happen when the higher brain is “offline” are big questions indeed.
Not only the higher brain. Various studies of brainstem activity during cardiac arrest have shown that the lower brain (the brainstem) is also shut down. Basically, the whole brain is not there to generate these experiences.
@@zakhust6840 Hi! Do you know any articles that mentions those studies? I’d like to learn more.
@@brebeaa RUclips is not letting me post the articles for some reason.
I’d love to grab some beer with these guys. What a polite loving conversation. ❤
1:30:40 My dad said he saw someone's head briefly turn into a skull once, he thought it was strange (of course) but thought no more of it. Then, a week later that same person died from being hit by a lorry... there's no way he could have smelt that he would be hit by a lorry. There is also a story of someone who signed off pilots going to battle in the second world war, where he knew the people who would die because he saw their heads as skulls. Again, you can't smell that, its not an illness that will affect them in the future, it's a physical event which happens in the future. It may in fact be synesthesia, but not by seeing smells, but seeing a different sense which may be dormant in a lot of people. Who knows. But it does certainly seem that the explanation is more complex than the sense of smell.
Nonsense
@@1234carlie Well Dr. Woerlee refers to it at 1:30:25, the timestamp in my post was wrong, that's what I'm responding to. The fact is those things happened. Maybe it was just a coincidence, and it was what Dr. Woerlee said, that its a form of synaesthesia, detecting an illness, and the people just happened to die in an accident before they died of the illness they had. Its kind of interesting but never seen it myself.
That’s really interesting. His senses give him an insight into future events. Time, from a higher dimension, is like space, so future events are already decided in some way. And, parapsychology shows that people can predict future events.
Is he still around? Someone should conduct some studies on him.
You lost me at "he thought no more of it."
@@DiogenesNephew lol, well, I'm summarizing what he told me, so I'm leaving some smaller details out. It's not like he saw their head turn into a skull, like a full transformation, with all blood all over it or whatever, but more like an x-ray of a skull, that their skull was slightly visible through their skin. At least that's how I understood it to mean. So he thought no more of it at the time because he thought he'd just imagined it.
Would it be possible to say everything is made of energy to be categorized into two types 1. undifferentiated energy and 2. differentiated energy so that our perception is the differentiated energy field; whereas the other is the underlying field of undifferentiated energy? Also, is it possible to say that consciousness is a characteristic of the undifferentiated energy field? And lastly can this undifferentiated energy field being outside time and space be interchangeable with the concept of eternity (not infinity) being something which does not classically exist and yet does exist?
before making any statements and classifications....I would suggest to check the scientific definition of energy. Energy: the capacity for doing work.
All the rest you wrote is just new age bovine manure.
Consciousness is an abstract concept of the quality of our ability to be aware of stimuli of the environment and our organism.
Making up unfalsifiable fields and energies is a pseudo philosophical practice which is in direct conflict with our verified scientific paradigm.
Advanced properties are not observed in fields or in carrier particles.(we only observe kinetic properties as energy in those scales)
Complex structures are needed for chemical, biological and mental properties to emerge.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 You should write a book.
Sergio, yes, I think so too
Materialism requires an absurd logical bootstrap for its very existence. On the one hand materialists deny naive realism. A materialist will be the first to admit that none of our conscious experience 'is' literally the external world. And yet, materialism cheats by treating mental experiences such as space and time as if they ARE literal one-to-one experiences of the external world. Materialism has to cheat in this manner....otherwise it has no handle on the external world whatever. But it means materialism is totally based upon circular reasoning and a bizarre bootstrapping that one is expected to overlook.
This is not correct characterization of materialism. Materialism just says that there are structures that persist regardless of the presence of mind; in effect, it merely says there is an external reality to observers. Idealism says that everything is mind. Both positions have limitations but the issues are mostly vocabulary. Idealism doesn't make sense because every example we have of mind is embodied in informational descriptions that are well-described in materialist terms, and if it's possible for a disembodied mind to exist we most likely couldn't interact with it anyway because immaterial things cannot affect the material as far as we can see (except for immaterial forces described by physics, which is, in fact, part of material reality). Again, every example we have of mind is, at the *very* least, intimately contingent on a material brain in crucial ways; we just have no examples of disembodied minds so we have no empirical evidence for their existence. This means that when we construct an empirical theory of mind we are absolutely forced into, at the very least, a partially materialist explanation. It does absolutely no good to say that we intuit that this can't be the whole picture, because the evidence is just what the evidence is and you have to make a theory based on evidence, not speculation, and the evidence we have is that minds come from, or at the very least, are intimately connected to, or rather, intimately dependent in at least some respects, bodies. And we have absolutely no clear evidence of something of "pure mind" affecting something material. And it's not like this isn't something empirical science can't test; all it would take is some sort of subjective phenomenon to be attested to by a subject that later causes a predictable change in material state. We never see this in the lab; it's always the other way around if it's not ambiguous: material precedes mental in predictable ways. The implication of this is that, based on current evidence, the "mind" is not separable from "the brain/body", and that's just something we have to deal with until we get evidence to the contrary. The implication, however, is that when an idealist says "reality is mind" it's as if they're saying "reality is mind and brain but without the brain", which just doesn't make any sense in explanatory terms because the idea of a mind without a brain is contrary to all empirical evidence.
It's misguided to argue that materialism can't explain everything, and that we are therefore forced to confront idealism as true, because no good materialist should really maintain that they can, in fact, explain everything. Godel proved in logic and math that some things are not provable, the Munchhausen Trilemma should demonstrate to anyone's satisfaction that all statements of truth are either circular, infinite regress, or dogmatic, and Plato's Allegory of the Cave should strike anybody as a good metaphor for how all of reality is indeed a mere model of "the actual, real truth". All of these are legitimate points that force us to accept that subjectivity is part of any notion of reality that we ourselves are capable of conceptualizing. It would be easy to say that this means that because we have no constructions of reality that are not subjective we are forced by default to accept idealism as a self-evident truth. The problem is it's not clear what the value of this kind of idealist model of reality provides us; it's just simpler for us to think of the external world as a "real, persistent thing" that exists in spite of our being there, because multiple people can measure it and find out that it has, in fact, got these persistent properties that are no dependent on mind as we understand it. If you want to invoke some sort of subjectivity model for reality that is reasonable to me, but the problem is it needs to incorporate an element of materialist metaphysics as well and then create a new hybrid vocabulary from the two. Materialism has some trouble saying "all is material" and has to create special categories of immaterial reality (forces, for example, or "consciousness" that is "somehow material") and then mix these into its metaphysics. This is the kind of materialism that makes the most sense, because it simply realizes that mind may be fundamental to at least some aspects of reality in some way, but doesn't discount the empirical models we have generated. On the other hand, in so generalizing the property of "mind" to "all of reality", idealism sort of shoots itself in the foot because it's trying to draw on something we have no examples of: disembodied aspects of mind.
@@superdog797 Er...no...you've completely utterly missed the point. How do you even arrive at your 'external reality' in the first place, when science rejects naive realism and thus ALL you have to go by is subjective experience. My point was that every time 'external reality' is referred to, it is a cheat.....it is a reference to a naive realism that science itself argues is invalid. You cannot on the one hand argue that subjective experience has ZERO one-to-one perception of 'external reality'....and in the same breath reference 'external reality' as if it were some objective thing on par with naive realism. 'External' is as much a qualia as red or blue or the smell of cheese. You do not have the handle on 'external reality' that you think you have. It's a bootstrapped cheat making use of a smidget of naive realism.
@@superdog797 "Again, every example we have of mind is, at the very least, intimately contingent on a material brain in crucial way"..................this is ass backwards. Nobody has ever seen a 'material brain' other than via a mind. The one thing I am 100% certain exists is my mind. You speak of 'empirical evidence', but ALL you actually have is conscious experience. And as the blue of the sky and the sound of Mozart are qualia and according to science do not exist 'out there'......how do you know that 'out there' even exists out there ? The true basis of idealism is that space and time are as much qualia as the blue of the sky.....that is a far better way of seeing idealism. An idealist is simply removing all last vestige of naive realism.
@@superdog797 "idealism sort of shoots itself in the foot because it's trying to draw on something we have no examples of: disembodied aspects of mind."........circular reasoning based on starting with the a priori axiom of an external world. You need to actually arrive at that axiom first. Like you, I used to think that idealism was absurd....but when you really get into Kant, Schopenhauer, etc, you realise that 'external reality' starts to fall apart the minute it is argued ( as everyone accepts ) that the sky is not really the qualia blue that we perceive. One ends up having to ask whether even space and time are externally real or are themselves qualia. And if space is a qualia......what then happens to the whole notion of 'external' ?? Dare to have that thought !
@@peterstanbury3833 I understand exactly what you are saying and I in fact agree that there is no reality that we have direct access to that is not experiential reality. This is a trivial observation, despite the fact that people generally don't realize it until they are a little older. The question is what is the best *model* of reality for us to describe it: an idealist one, or a materialist one?
Theories and models are meant to explain things, and they come with built-in assumptions. Relativity is the best model to explain the universe we live in, but it postulates (i.e. "sneaks in") two assumptions - completely unprovable and unconfirmable - that the speed of light is constant for all observers, and that the laws of physics do not vary based on frames of reference. Despite these being brute assumptions, the theory has implications and predictions that we observe to be correct. That's why it's the best theory, despite being incomplete in terms of absolute knowledge.
I'm not saying materialist ideas can explain everything - they're just the best explanation out there, and they seem to make the fewest brute postulates. If the basis for your idealism is, in part, that all of the reality we have direct access to is experiential reality, and that you cannot construct inferences to a material-phenomena-as-real world because the very basis that stimulated that impulse was a "mental" one in the first place, then you similarly would have to discard the very presence of other minds themselves, because we have absolutely no access whatsoever to anyone else's immaterial world, and be left with solipsism. Solipsism is actually more consistent with an ultraskeptical position but I'm just not going to accept solipsism as a model for reality because I think there is a sense in which you really exist independently of me.
Now, I understand, and might even be interested to know, that you or another idealist could provide some sort of explanation or framework for explaining reality in purely idealist terms, and it will always be possible for an idealist to retort to anyone who disagrees that "everything you said comes from your mind". I just don't see the use in such a rejoinder, have not seen any such vocabulary, and I don't see what idealism is going to teach us that is useful about the world. Idealism itself has serious issues because when it invokes the term "mind" it is already falling into vocabulary that is problematic for idealism. If you look around the world it makes perfect sense to postulate that mind is somehow either produced or at the very least "concentrated" by material constructions, and that "thought" does not occur apart from certain neurological processes. That is not a "provable" idea but it is a model that explains the data we see. Idealism just ignores all that and says "everything is mind", which if you think about it, actually dispenses with any explanatory power at all because any time you invoke an explanation that "everything is this one thing" you are actually explaining very little at all indeed. The absolute best model is probably some pseudo-mixture and/or novel combination of idealism and materialism, but that's a complex idea that I'm not sure most people have time to go into, and if they did, I don't see what they would benefit from it other than intellectual pleasure.
Great Conversation
Introduction ends at 02:01
Great discussion. Was there ever a part 2?
I agree with Bernardo on almost everything, however, when they were talking about NDEs, I don't understand why Bernardo said that the NDEs with accurate perceptions are implausible or not important, I disagree, maybe I'm misinterpreting his position on that aspect of NDEs but that's what I understood from what he said, or maybe he just has more interest on NDEs that have more focus on the transcendental.
Schopenhauer was also sceptical of near death experiences. Maybe it something to do with their intellectual stance disallowing unexplainable phenomena.
I don't think there has been any legitimate accurate perceptions found for NDE's - as Bernardo stated the NDE's reporting they floated above their body and saw their body and the room were re-creations by the mind to maintain continuity, like false awakenings with lucid dreams. This doesn't discredit NDE's though, they are still remarkable happening when brain activity is impaired or reduced, as it is under the effects of psychedelics.
@@DamienMcKinnon Pam Reynolds was verifiably not a recreational experience by the mind. She made accurate perceptions at a period when her EEG was flat.
@@pandawandas Pam Reynold's case isn't entirely convincing and can't be used as an example to irrefutably prove that she had true perceptions of the actual room while having zero brain activity. This is not to say she wasn't experiencing anything during this time, just that it was likely a re-creation of the room and not a true perception of floating above her body. I've had false awakenings while attempting to lucid dream where I think I've woken up - I've actually gotten up out of bed and gone to the toilet rather disappointed that I woke up and failed to have a lucid dream, only to wake up as I was about to pee and realize I was actually dreaming I woke up! The bedroom and bathroom were practically identical to how it normally is and felt incredibly real as I walked from my bed into the ensuite. This alone shows how powerful the mind is in creating an environment or a so-called "reality". I wasn't brain dead obviously, but we know already that reductions in brain activity can promote extremely rich experience, as is the case with psychedelics. Zero brain activity may still do the same, which is why I do not discredit NDE's and find them fascinating & worthy of serious scientific study.
@@DamienMcKinnon All of Pam's observations took place while her brain was in burst suppression (deepest anesthetic state that's possible, brain shut down from barbituric anesthetics) So the case is solid as it always has been.
A wonderful discussion between Dr. Woerlee and Dr. Kastrup. One thing I would take issue w/ with respect to Bernardo is his admitted bias towards the notion that personal agency ends with the death of the physical body. I would submit there's actually a considerable argument towards the idea that it doesn't, at least in the way that Bernardo describes.
For example, it is a presumption to assert that the dissociation of the self that we experience here is a 1:1 to Ultimate Reality, which is to say that behind the world we experience is, in fact, the fundamental reality of universal consciousness. I'd submit that there's empirical evidence to suggest that this may *not* be the case. We see examples of this every day in multiple personalities; which from idealism's POV is an already dissociated mind itself giving way to further dissociations! A dream within a dream if you will. This is inarguable and prompts me to ask whether this is happening on an even grander scale. Who's to say that our physical selves aren't merely the dream avatars of a higher order consciousness that is itself still a dissociation of the universe?
To argue this further, I'd also submit that NDEs (near-death experiences), as varied and subjective as they are, may be more akin to waking from a dream than the dissolution of personal agency. That's not to infer nor suggest that we take every NDE account at face value, but rather to look at the broad trends and see what we may be able to glean from them. For example:
- One commonality is what so many have described as "spirit guides" or a "higher self". This speaks for itself, IMO. We very well could be communicating w/ our higher order consciousness, and what so many describe as being sent back or being told it's "not their time" could be interpreted as the purpose of the dream not having been fulfilled.
- Following from the first is the commonality of pre-planning one's life. Some describe this as signing a contract. I'd submit that this could be the personal interpretation of our lower order consciousness (no offense intended) remembering our higher self's intent in inserting themselves into the dream. This, of course, would suggest that we're the manufacturers of our lives to an extent.
- Another commonality is what so many describe as a barrier of sorts, a line (which can vary in form from the top of a hill to a door, etc.) that they recognize as a point of no return. From this POV, this takes on the meaning of fully waking from the dream and reintegrating w/ our higher self.
Taken all together, I'd argue that none of this contradicts the basis of Dr. Kastrup's idealism. Rather it's an extension of that idea that, yes, consciousness is all that still fundamentally exists - but the scope of complexity that it takes could well be beyond the fairly simple version that he lays out.
The fundamental bases of reality is consciousness. How ever there are categories of consciousness. From this perspective we can perfectly maintained the main idea of idealism with out nullifying the sense of individual self.
It seems that Bernardo kastrup avoids this, in fear of having to deal with implications on substance dualism.
@@yadurajdas532 In fairness to Bernardo, he has openly entertained the idea of different stratums of conscious identity - but he's not quite ready to embrace it yet out of his own admitted bias that it would lend towards the idea that individual suffering (a necessity for continued growth) doesn't end.
Bernardo's gone into detail on how suffering *does* have meaning in how it reflects upon the individual and can foster personal growth - but that doesn't mean or enjoys it or relishes the thought that it could be an unending process.
That aside, I'd argue that there are clear (albeit limited) observations that lend towards individual identity, in some sense, perservering after physical death.
First is the simple observation that the physical body (or even just the brain) doesn't immediately vanish and/or dissolve after physical death and consciousness appearing to have gone.
From Bernardo's POV, perhaps he might try to argue that the slow decay of the physical body is the *representation* of individual identity dissolving back into the universal mind - however the problem w/ this is the conflation of entropic time as it exists here w/ something that exists outside of time *entirely*. Bernardo discussed something similar along evolutionary lines in an interview w/ Donald Hoffman a while back. What's Bernardo's reasoning to think so in this context?
Another observation follows from the first, and that's the observed phenomenon of terminal lucidity. For those unfamiliar, it's basically the occurence when a patient suffering severe brain damage from something like Alzheimer's or dementia is close to death and, for some reason, suddenly regains clear lucidity *despite* the damage to their brain in the days and/or weeks leading up to their death.
Now this, IMO, is a bigger problem for Bernardo's view of death than the first. If we simply look at the brain as the representation of the dissociated identity, then there should be no room for a clearly damaged brain to suddenly regain lucidity. This is a clear contradiction.
Again, in fairness to Bernardo, perhaps he might try to work his way around this by arguing on the issue of memory - and that memory, even if we don't quite understand how, isn't localized within the specific dissociated identity and that there are rare occurences where a person close to death can somehow tap into this memory to act like their old selves again.
I have two problems w/ this. First is that it seems a tortured line of argument to suggest that a severely damaged brain that can't even communicate properly is going to have the capacity to do something like this. Second is that even *if* you grant the first (which I don't, but for the sake of argument), it would seem *highly* unlikely for it to persist as long as documented cases of terminal lucidity do. We're not talking about a few sparse minutes here. We've cases that have lasted for days or even weeks.
One last observation (there are more, but this has gone on long enough already) is Bernardo's own lived experience. He himself has experimented w/ psychedelic drugs and confirmed an *expansion* of conscious experience despite a decline in actual brain activity. He's argued this specifically in debates w/ physicists!
Now how, exactly, can we look at the brain as a representation of the dissocatied consciousness when even a brain that isn't close to death (as Bernardo's wasn't in his experiments w/ drugs) shows a clear decline in activity and yet he himself experiences a higher state of consciousness? This makes no sense.
@@ryanashfyre464 thank you for your reply sir. I just noticed it
If you have a list of points like these in regards to BK work, I would like to see it if you will.
I had watch a lot of material from Bernardo Kastrup, and remember noticing some inconsistencies in connection with his view on meta congnition and eternal self individuality, as you have mention, specially when he uses expiring base reasoning.
Just curious to know, what is your philosophical stand ? dualist… idealist, a combination of both
@@yadurajdas532 W/ respect to the broad spectrum of Bernardo's work, I'd ask you to be specific in what you want me to respond to. I'm happy to do so as I did w/ regards to his views on physical death, but to try and sum up my views on his entire body of work in a YT comment is nearly impossible.
That aside, w/ regards to my particular philosophical views, I hesitate to pin myself down w/ any single definition - but I'd lean towards *some* version of Idealism rn, but the devil's in the details and I want to try and keep myself open in that regard.
My reason for that is both in Idealism's broad explanatory powers and simply the fact that its chief alternative, Materialism, has effectively ruled itself out as a serious alternative both in its diminished explanations for the world and even via our accumulated scientific evidence.
@@ryanashfyre464 thank you for your replay Sir.
What’s your view on substance dualism.
Some of the observations you have made on BK idea that individuality of the self disappears after death, will imply some sort of dualism.
Will you subscribe to some kind of dualism within idealism or fundamental categories within consciousness. For example consciousness as a fundamental substance of reality, but not as a one single consciousness as BK conceives it, but rather as a conglomeration of individual units of consciousness?
Decades ago, as a child, before I even knew what idealism was, I encountered the arguments of Woerlee while I was looking for answers to big questions. Listening to him speak feels like watching a rerun of an old show.
In the past he was heavily focused on combating substance dualism and supernatural interpretations of near death experiences. In this debate, it seemed like he wanted to bring some of those old arguments into play - such as his objection to the "reducing value". However, those arguments are not effective against a modern idealist.
Nothing can be against "modern" idealism ( or New Age Woo). Modern idealism is a pseudo philosophical, unfalsifiable , new age, death denying ideology. Nobody can falsify something that is designed to be untestable.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 Idealism is a well established, well defined ontology that has existed for hundreds of years. Yet here you are calling it a "pseudo-philosophy". Tell me, by what measure do you call idealism a "pseudo-philosophy", and do you extend that same logic to the other main contenders as well?
Idealism is indeed unfalsifiable, but so is physicalism, dualism, and any other ontological position that deals with the nature of our reality.
@@anduinxbym6633 -" Idealism is a well established, well defined ontology that has existed for hundreds of years."
-Yes this is a common misconception of what criteria are relevant for this evalution. The years of existence (fallacious Argument from Age) and how well a pseudo philosophical view doesn't make it an "established" academic view or even a philosophical one!
-". Tell me, by what measure do you call idealism a "pseudo-philosophy", and do you extend that same logic to the other main contenders as well?"
-Great question. In order for a view to be philosophical it needs to be founded on knowledge , not on supernatural presuppositions. The conclusion of the view must be a wise claim (philos+sophia) that helps us understand our world (or the phenomenon in question) allowing us to work upon and produce further knowledge and wisdom.
Idealism like any other worldview(materialistic or not0 are just dry declarations that contribute nothing to our philosophical endeavor and our epistemology. They are wishful hot air about an unobservable, underlying reality that we can not investigate.
They worldviews are by definition pseudo philosophy.
-"Idealism is indeed unfalsifiable, but so is physicalism, dualism, and any other ontological position that deals with the nature of our reality."
-Correct. The difference with the materialistic pseudo philosophies is that we can assumed them and work on that assumption (as if the material is all there is ) and really studying the world.
Of course its a useless pretentious assumption. We don't know what we are aware is all there is.
On the other hand,The problem with idealism is that we can not even "observe" this realm so its irrelevant. We can not work upon this assumption, produce knowledge or technical applications based on its principles....its Not even wrong.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 It comes as no surprise that you would open with a straw man. I never stated that the years of existence of a position _alone_ define the worth of that position - but the fact is, idealism has endured for as long as it has because it has withstood the arguments of opposing philosophers for centuries, and it will withstand your nonsense as well. It remains tenable to this day, and it is one of the major contending positions in this subject - the strongest one, in my opinion.
You said: *_"In order for a view to be philosophical it needs to be founded on knowledge , not on supernatural presuppositions."_*
That's a loaded word. When people think of supernatural, they think of spooky ghosts and witches, but here you are using the word "supernatural" in an entirely different way to encompass a whole category of philosophy - in fact, you are branding every tenable position that deals with the nature of reality to be supernatural "woo".
You said: *_"The conclusion of the view must be a wise claim (philos+sophia) that helps us understand our world (or the phenomenon in question) allowing us to work upon and produce further knowledge and wisdom."_*
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It has existed for as long as humanity has, and has never been limited to science, as you seem to believe.
You said: *_"They worldviews are by definition pseudo philosophy."_*
If you look up the term "pseudo philosophy", you will see that it's a term applied to any philosophical idea or system which does not meet a set of standards. The problem is, there is no universal agreement on those standards. So, you are correct only because the term _"pseudo philosophy"_ has no clearly defined standards. In fact, any branch of philosophy could (by definition) be called a "pseudo philosophy" by somebody who creates their own set of "standards".
The term "pseudo philosophy", loosely defined as it is, is by _definition_ nothing more than a fancy way of saying _"I do not respect this branch of philosophy."_ Well, thank you for your opinion on the subject.🙄🙄🙄
You said: *_"Correct. The difference with the materialistic pseudo philosophies is that we can assumed them and work on that assumption (as if the material is all there is ) and really studying the world."_*
You can "assume" any of the contending positions, and go on to observe, test, and acquire knowledge about the world around you. They are all unfalsifiable and they are all founded in assumption. There is no difference in that regard. Materialistic philosophies are no more conductive to scientific progress than idealism is.
You said: *_"Of course its a useless pretentious assumption. We don't know what we are aware is all there is."_*
I do not find discussions about the nature of reality to be useless at all. Our world view is deeply intertwined with our human psychology, our thought processes, and our wellbeing.
You said: *_"On the other hand,The problem with idealism is that we can not even "observe" this realm so its irrelevant."_*
When you say it is irrelevant, what do you believe it is irrelevant to? To you, personally? Well, this subject matter is "relevant" to me and to many other philosophers who do find it to be a worthy expenditure of time. In fact, I would wager that it's "relevant" to almost everybody who delved into this topic, found this video, and watched it.
To science? That's questionable. If a scientist adopts a founding set of ideals that tells them that certain phenomenon should be impossible, then they will choose to not investigate that possibility. On the other hand, if the world view of a scientist tells them that possibility could exist, they will be much more likely to choose to investigate it. If our world view can steer the path of scientific investigation, then can our world views truly be said to be irrelevant to science?
You said: *_"We can not work upon this assumption, produce knowledge or technical applications based on its principles....its Not even wrong."_*
I do not care whether or not scientific knowledge will be produced from metaphysical speculation. I still find value in this subject.
@@anduinxbym6633 -" I never stated that the years of existence of a position alone define the worth of that position"
-Who told you that a fallacy is only when it is stated "alone"?
You referred to that detail as if it would affects the validity of this faith based belief!
-"but the fact is, idealism has endured for as long as it has because it has withstood the arguments of opposing philosophers for centuries,"
-That says nothing. Santa Clause has endured in our culture...what does that say for the truth value of that claim. Again logical fallacy.
-"and it will withstand your nonsense as well."
-ad hominem. Can you even post an argument without committing a logical fallacy? I guess if you could you wouldn't be an idealist.
-"It remains tenable to this day, and it is one of the major contending positions in this subject - the strongest one, in my opinion."
-For psychological reasons. People ease their existential and epistemic anxieties with death denying ideologies like idealism. The truth is that in Academic philosophy it is consider as pseudo philosophy.
-"That's a loaded word. When people think of supernatural, they think of spooky ghosts and witches, but here you are using the word "supernatural" in an entirely different way to encompass a whole category of philosophy - in fact, you are branding every tenable position that deals with the nature of reality to be supernatural "woo".
-Strawman. Supernatural is any claim that assumes the existence of properties or entities or agents non contingent to any physical structure which is in direct conflict with the current established scientific paradigm. So in short, the projection of mind properties in addition to Nature is a supernatural claim.
-"Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It has existed for as long as humanity has, and has never been limited to science, as you seem to believe."
- I defined what Philosophy is (Philos+sophia), what is the ultimate goal of this intellectual endeavor...not what it can be studied by this method.
Again the argument from age is a fallacious and irrelevant. Aristotle was the first one who systematized logic and philosophy and the one who understood the role of Knowledge in Philosophy. Science was defined by him as the second fundamental step in the Philosophical method. A claim can never be accepted as wise if it isn't based on established knowledge. And wisdom is the ultimate goal of Philosophy. If you can not understand that you are wasting people's time claiming that supernatural claims are Philosophy.
Knowledge always limits our philosophy mate. This is why we do philosophy...to understand what our current knowledge means for the things we don't currently know.
Science is Philosophy on far better data (Natural Philosophy) and with a set of methodologies able to produce further knowledge.
Most of magical thinkers don't have a clue about the relation of Philosophy and Science and the role of science in the scientific method....
-"If you look up the term "pseudo philosophy", you will see that it's a term applied to any philosophical idea or system which does not meet a set of standards. The problem is, there is no universal agreement on those standards. So, you are correct only because the term "pseudo philosophy" has no clearly defined standards. In fact, any branch of philosophy could (by definition) be called a "pseudo philosophy" by somebody who creates their own set of "standards"
-Sorry but you are informed. Here are the main standards of what "qualifies" as pseudo philosophy.
Pseudo philosophy is :
1.Philosophy that relies on fallacious arguments to a conclusion
2. Relies on factually false or undemonstrated premises
3. isn't corrected when noted.
Idealism checks all three boxes.
-"The term "pseudo philosophy", loosely defined as it is, is by definition nothing more than a fancy way of saying "I do not respect this branch of philosophy." Well, thank you for your opinion on the subject."
-This is what pseudo philosophers and they followers want to believe since their ideology is a text book example of a pseudo philosophy.
Claims on undemonstrated premises and fallacious arguments can never be wise(σοφία) so by definition ideologies that rely on them are pseudo philosophical.
-"You can "assume" any of the contending positions, and go on to observe, test, and acquire knowledge about the world around you. They are all unfalsifiable and they are all founded in assumption. There is no difference in that regard. Materialistic philosophies are no more conductive to scientific progress than idealism is."
-The problem with idealism is that the assumed conclusion of the ideology can not be observed or studied. The materialistic philosophies are just an unfounded generalization based on the foundings of Science. Idealism is just unfounded speculations about the underlying ontology of what we observe. At least materialism generalizes an observation even if this is indefensible.
Are inanimate objects just the external appearance of ‘thoughts’ of the underlying conscious substratum? Is that why there is so much consensus between the experience of different people? If you throw a ball, I can catch it. Is it because the ball is a ‘thought’ of the same universal consciousness, and because we are alters of that same underlying consciousness, this is why why our experiences coincide? Is that it? Or how else can we account for the fact that we all seem to be moving around in a shared world?
It doesn't seem helpful to consider consciousness without awareness. If there is no point of awareness to be experiencing the state (like you might be unconscious), then calling that conscuousness seems to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people.
Maybe a better term is needed that steers away from the terms "unconscious" and "conscious" used to describe brain states?
Also, the language of "what it is like to be" also aludes to some kind of human like experience, even when applied to the sunflower example. We cannot be a sunflower, or escape our human experiences when thinking about what it might be like to be a sunflower. It's like saying there is something like to be a particle, where the interaction of internal and external forces cause various behaviour. It just seems like word games to support a theory and not a true explanation...
As I pointed out to Gerald years ago he cannot explain the Hidden Observer in fact up to then he had never heard of it. I am a hypnotist I know there is a part of us that never sleeps even when we are anaesthetized during surgery we have been warning surgeons to be careful what they say whilst the patient is lying there:local12.com/news/local/patient-sues-anesthesiologist-who-mocked-him-while-sedated
@@samrowbotham8914 thats very interesting! Would you call a hypnotic state a "conscious" state or an "unconscious" state? Does this part ("silent witness"?) that sticks around even when unconscious have its own memory, or does it add to our own memories? I still find the language around this, being conscious ( ego is aware) and unconscious ( ego is shut down) and then "consciousness" as a foundational aspect of reality misleading.
@Language and Programming Channel how are you defining the word "conscious" here? How would you compare "conscious" to "unconscious" (as in knocked out or in deep sleep). Are you using "consciousness" (the metaphysical prima materia) and "conscious" (being awake/aware) as having the same meaning? Becuase you used the words seemingly interchangeably in that sentence.
@Language and Programming Channel so you are talking about being aware of and responding to one's surroundings, as opposed to unconscious and being not awake and aware of and responding to one's environment?
Sanskrit is a very refined language designed for these ideas.
There is a problem with telling people they are wrong. Eventually they will believe. And everyone else excepts it . It's a Phenomenon.
As much as I love Kastrup and think many of his ideas are compelling, and Im more than open to idealism...
It is very disheartening to me when I constantly hear him use psychedelic neuroscience to substantiate his idealist claims (leveraging the findings in his actual introduction no less). This is a great example of how, although it should be encouraged as much as possible, interdisciplinary thinking can go awry purely because the person has expertise in one field (in Kastrup's case, philosophy) yet is by no means one in the other fields (in this case, neuroscience). It also gives me a great deal of hesitation when I consider his words on psychiatry (e.g. MPD/DID) or quantum physics (e.g. wave function reduction) for the same reason.
Ultimately, no neuroscientist researching psychedelic brain effects has any issue whatsoever with the results, or finds themselves having to contemplate any other model than materialism. David Nutt, the pioneer who started this inquiry in the UK at Imperial, did use Huxley's "Reducing valve" metaphor when discussing the original findings - but these were in 2012 when such initial results, showing psilocybin to reduce activity globally in the brain, where totally unexpected given the crude equation of more experience (i.e. positive symptoms e.g. hallucinations) means more neural activity. We've come a very long way in a decade, where this simpler fMRI lead to functional-connectivity MRI (fcMRI) recording inter-network dynamics, in turn leading to directed functional connectivity MRI which explores the causal influence of networks upon networks, and further to means of measuring the overall entropy or integrated information...
What psychedelics do to the brain is decrease the activity of - and internal integration in - specific intrinsic networks, namely the Default-Mode Network (correlating to self-referential mentation) which serves as a central 'hub' of neural connectivity, resulting in 'desegregation' of global brain regions ultimately meaning a 'hyper-connected' brain state of circuits normally shielded from the influence of other circuits suddenly communicating in tandem. Thus, while certain regions of the brain may be disintegrated/lowered in activity, the critical nature of these regions means this effect causes, for want of a better word, *increases* in "activity" in the specific form of global connectivity. Given one highly promising theory of consciousness (in cognitive neuroscience) being that of 'integrated information theory', this hyper-connected state is precisely what accounts for this *expanded* state of consciousness. The more integration, the more conscious experience...
If Kastrup were to acknowledge this, I'd be fascinated to hear his (perhaps revised) opinions. I do describe all this in my Seeking I interview with Darren here, if anyone's interested: ruclips.net/video/KgQXGS0X_1o/видео.html
The argument being made here is essentially that brain disorganization gives rise to psychedelic experiences. I suppose it could work under IIT, but not materialism. Materialism states that experiences are complicated brain activity, and you see none of that correlating with psychedelics.
Really, all you need is hard problem of consciousness and Hempel's dilemma. But we like to hear Bernardo dispelling ignorance so we stretch 1 minute to 1 hour. Why do mediocre-wits always focus straining out gnats and end up swallowing elephants? :P
@@pandawandas you need to study neuroscience....not compare pseudo Philosophical worldviews(idealism , materialism) to understand psychedelic events.
I would argue that Kastrup is more well-versed in neuroscience than most neuroscientists are in philosophy.
I could have done without the scoliosis journey into the weeds, or Dr. Woerlee's irrelevant digression into the smell of schizophrenics! Apart from that a very interesting debate. Bernardo brilliant as usual! I would have liked the subject of reincarnation to have been brought up in the questions. Prof Ian Stevenson and Dr.Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia have done serious study on the validity of thousands of cases over 50 years. This would be a challenge to both men's views, it seems!
Unfortunately Woerlee was beating around the bush...
I'm not really responding to the comment above, but I think it was you who responded to my question about an objection to idealism according to which the argument from parsimony leads to solipsism. The response effectively was that we can, through inductive reasoning based on certain empirical observations, make a non-solipsist inference. To play devil's advocate, I think someone could just respond to that by saying that the relevant empirics could just be accounted for in terms of the imagination or mental processes of the only existing subject -- effectively dreaming up the empirics. And therefore, solipsism is still the most parsimonious view and has sufficient explanatory power.
I have my own response to this, but if I remember correctly that you were addressing this is the chat, I'm curious how you'd respond to this.
@@highvalence7649 As Russell said : “As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it. I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.”
I added at the end that it is more plausible to postulate something outside of our own subjective experience, but this doesn't need to invoke another ontological category that would be different from mind.
@@iwatochmyna9764 Thanks for your reply.
Again, just paying devil's advocate here but, why would that be more plausible if solipsism can account for the relevant empirics and is more parsimonious than postulating something outside of our own subjective experience that is ontologically indistinct from mind?
@@highvalence7649 And what's your own response to this ?
@@iwatochmyna9764 That being able to account for the relevant facts and having an advantage in parsimony is not enough. Falsifiability is also a relevant criteria, and it is not falsifiable to claim that any given empirical evidence can be accounted for in terms of being dreamed up or imagined. But personally, I think if the arguments come down to those technical details that, at least to me, somewhat undermines the force of the parsimony argument which is why I also prefer other arguments, some of which parsimony is one of other relevant factors in determining the superior metaphysic which in my view is idealism.
But I haven't seen Bernardo address precisely this which is why I asked the question. But when it occurred to me to ask it the convo was over.
Take a drink every time Dr. Woerlee says “basically”. 😏
Worker's comments on NDE'S were absurd and ridiculously dismissive. No one has ever explained why anyone would have an experience of connection with God as they are in a state of unconsciousness.
Why would the biology of our body create this narrative? It is utterly absurd.
There is definitely a scientific explanation for that.
I knew from Woerlee's opening statement that he had not truly grasped Kastrup's ideas, and it was going to be an easy debate for BK. I could even tell from the expression on Bernardo's face (is that you got? lol) that he knew this as well. lol Woerlee seems like a good man though.
Virtually no one has. Kastrup is relatively little known.
I must've missed the part where a reason was given to believe Idealism is true
I like the dead squirrel on the anaesthetist's head.
Why are so many people so willing to jump on an idea just because they think it’s interesting? Idealism is fun and all, but it’s not terribly scientific. It makes a lot of assumptions, where materialism makes the most accurate predictions.
_30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind._
_31. We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing._
Think about watching play in a theater and receiving the story in your mind...lets say the physical movement and the story happen together.....one is the mirror of the other.....the idea expresses itself as movement and the movement expresses itself as the idea. It is a dualism where one doesn't cause the other. It is a good start towards a panpsychist model of reality.
Dr Woerlee is wrong to assert that there is an issue with the transpersonal becoming the personal. There is an exact analogy ( it may even be the very same phenomenon ) of this in quantum mechanics. One can assign a wave function to a particle, but that wave function is also part of the wave function of the experimental apparatus, which in turn is part of the wave function of the world...and at the ultimate level a single wave function describes the entire universe. Thus this distinction into local and non-local already exists within physics, in fact right at the heart of quantum mechanics, and is not a conceptual impossibility.
Pete, forgive me but I'm completely confused. Every exchanged we've had on the various Facebook groups you've been very stringently defending the position that the brain produces consciousness... any suggestion I and others made against this was met with harsh opposition and dare I say ridicule. Has your position changed? If so would be interested in hearing why.
@@SeekingI I've generally always advocated Kant's transcendental idealism, and that one cannot extrapolate an objective external world from subjective qualia that one then claims do not exist in that external world. What you are referring to is completely different arguments about materialism vs 'non materialism'....and my point there has always been that 'non material' is akin to 'nothing' and that even an idealist has to suppose that the mental world is made of some sort of 'material'. So I do not think the argument between materialism and idealism is an argument between materialism and 'non materialism' at all and it is wrong to see it as such. Both sides have 'material'....the argument is over what sort of material it is and whether it 'depends' on mind or not.
@@SeekingI Various personal experiences have also changed my perspective. Deep, mystical meditative experiences that are extremely hard to describe so I generally don't.
@@peterstanbury3833 Why would 'non material' be akin to nothing? And when you say that 'even an idealist has to suppose that the mental world is made of some sort of 'material'', are you conceiving of the mental as necessarily ontologically distinct from the material that an idealist purportedly has to suppose makes up the mental?
@@highvalence7649 I'll answer your question by simply asking you to provide a single...even just one...example of anything that has absolutely no material substrate. That is surely the very definition of 'nothing'. I mean...a table is composed of some sort of material, whether it is physical or mental. What is a 'not table' composed of ? The very act of defining a thing is the act of assigning it a material status, as it is only the material difference between that and nothing that defines existence at all ! What properties does 'non material' have that distinguish it from 'nothing' ? Please list them.
Somehow, for some bizarre reason, people have assumed that to be against materialism ( i.e physical realism ) one has to conjecture a 'non material' realm....as it sounds like it is the opposite of materialism. But the opposite of materialism is not 'non material'...it is 'nothing'. The REAL argument is between physical realism and idealism...and even Kastrup ( and Hoffman and others ) argues that the idealism world is composed of some sort of 'material'. Thus idealism is not, as many seem to believe, synonymous with non-materialism.
Yeah Woerle was out for blood (in a nice sense) he was expecting a pseudo science new age hocus pocus debatte but he got Bernardo.. 😅😂😂
consciousness is taxation without representation
I
Mr. Kastrup does not ask as to believe against evidence , I appreciate that and I have nothing against "metaphysical speculation. " But without evidence how are we to distinguish between metaphysics? For example Spinozist monism with both mind and matter as "attributes"( or even a postulated infinity of attributes) does just as well in my opinion. In addition, I think we have a more exhilarating answer to the question of "how a man should live " in Spinoza than in Schopenhauer. If I adopted Mr. Kastrup's outlook how would this change the way I lead my life?
Kastrup uses the criteria of parsimony, internal consistency, and explanatory power
@@Sam-hh3ryClaiming "explanatory power" bothers me. As Kant has pointed out the propension of human reason to understand the whole is louable. ( We know his answer) But how can we "explain" something like "universal consciousness " of which we don't have a hint of? I suppose it is permitted to be agnostic.
@@ruhdandoujon6310 Sure it is permitted to be agnostic, but let me add that in Katrup's ontology, consciousness is not what is to be explained, but things are explained by reducing them to consciousness. Consciousness just is (just as Deus sive natura for Spinoza).
@@kaleidoskoptv00 Thank you for your answer. I am happy with the paralel with Spinoza. Schopenhauer, Spinoza affinities.
One becomes attuned to the fundamental consciousness. Egofree, joyfull. Outlook change. As an idealist, this it IT. If you are looking for prescriptions on how to live, seek a man made god.
The technology we are improving that detects/predicts dream imagery undermines dr. Kastrup's hypothesis that consciousness isnt a material process
I think Dr Kastrup has covered how that works into his hypothesis. Take a look around his channel, I’m sure he has. It may have been this one: ruclips.net/video/RtOXx84aT-c/видео.html
@@SeekingI predictions of neurologists from the dream reading technology trump post hoc reasoning after the fact I would think. Its not that I dont understand the problem of underdetermination, its that I think that shows dr.kastrup's argument to be essentially an unfalsifiable and unnecessary addition to any already working hypothesis. Its the same as saying "god could have guided evolution". It adds nothing but post hoc logical possibility.
Ive never seen him address this issue anywhere, and if he did, he would have a hypothesis with a prediction that we could test about consciousness. That would award him many acomplishments and would move science in the idealist direction. The fact that no such event has happened makes me highly skeptical that he adds any useful comprehension to our current understanding at all.
@@Hhjhfu247 everything ever understood by us has been physical. Energy is physical, quantum fields are physical....literally everything is physical.
So unless you can show me HOW something non physical even can exist, physicalism is just another word for "things that we actually know exist"
There is no way to show how you get from.material processes to consciousness, what that imagery shows.is what the experience looks.like on a dashboard of measurement as he would say.
@@aal2206 oh I agree with that. I am only debunking his claim that idealism answers the hard problem because materialism can't in principle.
This shows that materialism could in principle explain consciousness, but I completely agree that we do not actually understand that yet.
Kastrup makes unsubstantiated and false claims
1. The foundations of physics "evidence" says absolutely nothing about matter being "mental" or conscious. No physicist think that today. It simply says that we don't have a full picture.
2. The world does not "appear to us" as "qualities. When I look around what my visual system informs me about are precise surface properties, angles, orientations, curvature, distance, location, direction and speed of motion etc. These are quantitative measures of physical properties (physical qualities) like space and geometry not magical "qualities" that he claims to exist.
3. Every so called evidence for experiences taking pace in the absence of brain activity are directly explained by the fact that the subject has no way of knowing WHEN those experiences were generated.To ignore this point is deliberate misrepresentation or disqualifying ignorance. Brain activity does not return to normal instantaneously after coma or injury or hypoxia and the activity during the recovery period is the explanation for the reported experiences. As for psychedelics, he deliberately misrepresents the data. If you take into account direct electrophysiological recording of neuronal activity (as well as MEG data) you find that there is a profoundly disorganized activity pattern not simply "reduced" activity. SO: disorganized neuronal activity = disorganized experience. Wow, who would have thought? Not only does this not contradict but it directly supports the neuronal basis of experience.!
4. Finally the explanatory power of physicalism and idealism are not even remotely similar. If the brain is just the "appearance" of what my experiences are then he needs to tell how contemplating the "redness of red" as an experiential "quality" explains why the neurons that respond to color are in hexagonally arranged patches in the primary visual cortex, not to mention to explain that we have specialized red color responsive photoreceptor cells in the retina, or that there is a brain at all.... His "theory" is pure science fiction. As soon as you try to use it to actually EXPLAIN anything it becomes completely intractable or incoherent. It's a shame that in the 21st century people still fall for this nonsense. Then again the epistemic breakdown of society reached the level that people think that anything that the "establishment" says must be false, that there are no viruses, COVID was made as a bioweapon but it also did not exist, the earth is flat and that maybe 1x1=2. Jesus.
I can smell toast!!!!!!!!!!
There you go we found Ellen Page.After İnception she began to ponder about existence and made enough money to leave the industry and start his journey to philosophical endeavors.
The host is chasing a symbol (the x) with another symbol (the cursor). Pretty much explains kastrups views.
Representing taileaters :)
Hello taileaters haha
@@SeekingI if your ever looking for a guest on your show to discuss dreams or conciouness please let us know.
When a discussion starts without any definitions on the main concepts of the premise in question...you immediately know you are going to experience pseudo philosophy of the highest magnitude.
And did you? How do?
@@SeekingI great questions!...
@@SeekingI Do not bother with that guy, he is just here to spam this comment section, push an agenda, and get the last word in every single thread to maintain the appearance of _"winning"._ I have clashed with him for years.
No brain, no consciousness
Woerlee got trounced
Surgeons thrash about a bit!!!!! Hahahahah!!! Aryanism!!
It doesn't matter what me or you think , pointless , there is no answer , punch in punch out , during our lifetime
Aryanism? My cat is better than your cat!!!
Dr.Kastrup is yet to understand that he's assertion "objective properties"
is a strawman erected agaInst the assertions of staunch materialism (Nominalism):
Properties are awarenesses = observed-nesses = IMAGINARY
properties are NO-thing = not existing
- made up, from/about SOME-thing = existing
- ascribed, assigned, attributed TO some-thing.
"Properties are invisible TO the eye"
"Properties ARE IN the eye"
A so called measurement of
a measurable property = parameter in the language of Physics
is but a useful assertion = objectization = quantities, valutas, {OF=FASKING} the property.
The objectivity of the property is FAKED by the assertion of a societal agreement.
The mind or human conciousness
it is the individual entirety of properties = NO-thing
momentarily being fabricated
Iow the mind is NO-thing = does not exist
The "basic consciousness" is the awarenesses=properties
made up from all that is immediately around the brain i.e. the own body.
-"The objectivity of the property is FAKED by the assertion of a societal agreement."
-Objective can only be a claim that is in agreement with current facts about a property. i.e. the claim "a brick wall is solid and won't allow us to pass through it" is an objective claim about an observable fact.
No type or societal agreement can change the objective value of a claim describing observable facts of a property.
So by having all the above in mind....properties can be describe by facts that are accessible to everyone...so those facts are objective making our claims about those properties objective.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 All that you DO describe, it is the object.
You ascribe, assign, attribute properties to it.
In any case, the property is imaginary,
and the assertion !!!OF!! the property is deemed TO BE objective -
but by people with some brain in their evolved-primate skulls.
We assign solid-ness/ impenetrablity to the wall
for the reason that we cannot pass through it.
*The wall as such causes that we cannot pass*
It is NOT an entity called solidness which causes that we cannot pass.
Peace!
Bernardo's claim is unfalsifiable
Please elaborate
@@SeekingI I can't find/imagine argument against "brain is an image of the mind"
@@malanthrope That’s not correct. For example, if phenomenal consciousness didn’t exist, Bernardo’s theory would be falsified.
Maybe Kastrup’s brain doesn’t.