Bernardo Kastrup is an Apple Blossom
This research conversation centers around the many ways the term ‘consciousness’ is used in science, philosophy and everyday life. We also discuss cognitive processes, empathy, the meaning of life, the inevitability of death & of course, metaphysical idealism.
The first time someone asked me if I knew of the work of philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, they introduced him to me as ‘very famous but very controversial in the online community.’ This fame and controversy come from his eloquent insistence that all reality is essentially mental, which is the subject of this conversation. Whether you are listening to this as Bernardo’s biggest fan or as someone who does not share his views, there is no denying that he has thought very deeply about such subjects and communicates about them with a clarity and passion that shows how much he cares for the wider tree. Though we start with some pretty heavy philosophy, Bernardo and I do get around to discussing how these views relate to real life, and how this view has changed his own way of being in the world. He really believes we all have something to give and in the end we are all just blossoms on the ever-growing tree.
“I would be honored to be called an apple blossom” he told me later, when I wrote that I’d like to call this episode ‘Bernardo Kastrup is an Apple Blossom.’
Enjoy!
The Scientific American Article we discuss at the beginning.
Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell
Bernardo Kastrup
03:02 Intro
08:08 Metaconsciousness
19:11 Personal Experiences & Consciousness
25:07 Metacognition, Evolution of Physicalism
50:51 Mistake of Ultimate Belief
51:43 Misconceptions
52:28 Neuroscience & Hallucinations
53:15 Consistency of False Beliefs
53:33 UnReality, Controlled Hallucinations
56:00 Materialism vs. Idealism
01:07:28 Role of Dissociation
01:17:16 Physicalism & Idealism
01:31:12 Consciousness & Reality
01:40:45 Unified Field of Subjectivity
01:42:44 Living Philosophy
01:42:57 Empathy, Challenges
01:44:27 Fear of Death & Psychedelic Insights
01:46:06 Meaning & Acceptance 01:47:02 Judgment & Neutrality
02:02:51 Impersonal in Me
02:18:58 Bouncer of the Heart
TRANSCRIPT:
Bernardo Kastrup is an Apple Blossom: Radical Consciousness
Bernardo Kastrup: [00:00:00] Sometimes you arrive in your garage and you realize You don't remember how you got there. You don't remember the drive at all. Were you unconscious during the drive? Of course not. You were conscious, but you were not metacognitive of the experience of driving because you were mulling your problems or you were thinking about something else.
It doesn't mean that you were unconscious of your driving. It only means that you didn't re represent it.
for an idealist, the world doesn't cease to exist. It's just that the idealist accounts for that world in a different way, a more sane way. But the world's still there and I'm still alive and I'm still up to having fun.
we fear the process of death. We don't fear what will happen after um that that is is not a given that is actually derived from a certain metaphysical position called physicalism Which is It's entirely untenable.
your life has never been, is not, and will never be about you. Not anymore than [00:01:00] the life of the apple tree is about one apple blossom,
I do not have the responsibility to make myself happy, which is the most overwhelming task that the cultural ethos invests us with. One, it's impossible. There are way too many variables at play for you to be able to control them.
So you can not make yourself happy. You may find yourself happy, because of grace and circumstance but it's not something that you can force in nature. And parting with that needs to make myself happy. It's like removing a ton of weight from my shoulder.
the intellect is still the bouncer of my heart.
It's just that it's a more sensitive and open minded bouncer now. But it can still shut the door.
Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to love and philosophy. Where we try to talk about deep meaningful subjects across traditional either [00:02:00] or divides or ways
were told, we should talk about these subjects. This is a conversation with Bernardo Kastrup. Who. Is the executive director of the Essentia foundation. And he set off this renaissance in rethinking what idealism might be metaphysical idealism. And his most recent book analytic idealism. in a nutshell, which I highly recommend. Basically the idea is that reality is mental.
And for some of you that might not make any sense. For others, it might make perfect sense and feel very controversial. Bernardo gets all kinds of reactions. But he's an incredibly clear thinker and incredibly articulate person to talk to you about many things, especially philosophy. He has a PhD in philosophy. He has a PhD in computer engineering. He works as a scientist, he works as a philosopher.
He was part of CERN, which is the European [00:03:00] organization for nuclear research. Uh, in some really exciting days of that. Uh, organization, he was part of the Phillips research laboratories. He goes, it goes on and on honestly, he's, co-founded a parallel processor company called Silicon hive. He works on these really super cool retro computers that I just absolutely love. But you can see on his website and he's a philosopher. Who's putting forth some very interesting ideas.
I remember the first time I really heard of Bernardo. Someone told me that his way of seeing the world reminded them of something. I was presenting at a conference and I should check him out, but he's very controversial. They said,
I'll let you decide if you think that's true or not. But the reason. People do say that is because his idea is that reality is fundamentally mental or essentially. Mental. And we talk about that year in terms of consciousness. I sort of frame it around consciousness because that's the research question [00:04:00] that I was contemplating. And the reason I wanted to talk to him. So we talk about what consciousness is, how it gets confused. I wonder if the word unconscious is even not applicable ever. I'll do another post about that. For now.
I just want to let you listen to Bernardo. And I hope that wherever you are, you're doing well today. If you want to help love and philosophy, there's a million ways. And. I definitely appreciate it. But most importantly, I just hope that you can think about this as philosophy as a way of life. And, whatever you might want to take from it that helps you I hope it does if these subjects might not seem like they have anything to do with. What you're dealing with today, if you're dealing with, with some problems, but I just hope that you can feel some love coming from me. And I don't mean that in a sticky sentimental way. I really just mean that. I'm trying to open my [00:05:00] pathway so that it meets yours in some way. That's helpful. So maybe there's something in here that helps. I hope so. All right. Here's Bernardo.
Andrea Hiott: Is there anything you want to know before we jump in or anything you want to talk about today? That's on your mind Let's
Bernardo Kastrup: jump in.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, let's jump in. So let's start with consciousness.
All right I found this Scientific American article of yours there have
Bernardo Kastrup: been like a dozen.
Andrea Hiott: Well, this one in particular, it was talking about how people often use consciousness in the wrong way, or a misguided way, or they assume meta consciousness.
Um, rather than consciousness, and this one in particular that was about children, about babies and studies that are done which say they become conscious at the age of five or something. Which is of course absurd if you understand consciousness through the
Bernardo Kastrup: experience, yeah. But
Andrea Hiott: it's not absurd to a lot of people and I know this word consciousness is potent difficult, but it is something I think [00:06:00] about a lot of the way We use it and we all hear it differently or have different interpretations of it.
But especially this article, when a child is born, is it already consciousness? I mean, can we go ahead and say any life that's moving or making way, experiencing maybe in your terms, is already consciousness in some?
In some sense. Would you agree with that?
Bernardo Kastrup: I mean, to think that the newborn does not experience that when a newborn cries immediately after being born, he's crying completely unconsciously, that there is no experience is just a mechanism in there, reducing the sound of crying in order to get help of some form.
I think that That's preposterous in this day and age. I think we are better than that now. Maybe Descartes could think that in the 17th century, but not human beings in the 21st century. Not educated human beings. Um, of course, experience is there. I believe experience is the experience in the sense of a [00:07:00] private conscious point of view, a phenomenal point of view that is private to the organism.
I think every organism has such a conscious point of view. Their experiences may be incredibly simple. The experiences of an amoeba, paramecium, may be incredibly simple, of an archaea, may be simple, but I think there is experience every time you see life. Why do I think that? Well, because we metabolize, and we know we experience.
We know that other higher animals that metabolize experience. We have plenty of indirect evidence for that, in case of cetaceans, dolphins or in the case of pachyderms, like elephants. other primates. Um, so even observing life under a microscope, you can see unicellular organisms running away from threats, chasing food.
Amoeba can build little vases, houses for themselves, out of mud particles at the bottom of the puddle where they live. There's plenty of evidence that everything that metabolizes has a private conscious point of view [00:08:00] from the get go, from, from the start.
Andrea Hiott: I agree, but why would you think that, in these studies, these are studies in the blog post, which I'll link to, a lot of the scientists, are very, I mean, they wouldn't say that, it's not a human or, you know, they're not trying to be cruel or something, but they really are sort of associating it with, I guess what you would call metaconsciousness, where Yeah.
It's almost like the observer can understand that the thing being observed knows that it's somehow a subject, almost.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, yeah. So I don't think there's maliciousness in people making claims that children become conscious at age 5. Because there is confusion around the term consciousness. What do we mean by it?
And that confusion goes back to To the inception of depth psychology at the end of the 19th century, Freud and Jung already talked about the unconscious as a psychic space. Well, if it's not conscious, in what way is it psychic? Well, it is phenomenally conscious. In other words, it's constituted of experiences.
But it is not [00:09:00] metaconscious. What is metaconsciousness? Metaconsciousness is the explicit awareness of one's own consciousness. It is to know that one has an experience. One can have an experience without metaconsciousness. For instance, we are always conscious of our breathing, but we only become metaconscious of it if I bring your attention to it.
Then you start explicitly knowing that you're experiencing the inflation of your rib cage and air flowing through your nostrils and so on. Um, And since the beginning, we have had this confusion. It takes, of course, a while for an infant to become explicitly aware of its own consciousness. In other words, to know that it is having an experience.
But it is experiencing from the get go. And we mistake this a lot, especially in neuroscience, because the report paradigm, there is now, for the past two years, Almost 10 years. There is a no report paradigm that is evolving. Um, so that [00:10:00] may help things a bit. But, um, for the longest time in neuroscience, um, investigation of consciousness was based on subjective reports.
In other words, you would measure brain activity in a subject, and then you would ask the subject, what are you experiencing? Now, of course, the subject can only report on the contents of metaconsciousness. It can only report on the experiences that it knows it is having. And therefore, we can't Conflate the two.
We think that consciousness is reportability. No, no, no, that is metaconsciousness. You need to re represent metacognitively an experience in order to be able to report that. You report the re representation, not the original experience. Jonathan Schuller already He elaborated on this in 2002 in one of his seminal papers, this distinction between consciousness and metaconsciousness, which is experimentally observed, by the way.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, this gets, kind of messy to try to really unpack, [00:11:00] but you brought up phenomenal consciousness, which I'm pretty sure you attribute to Block in the normal way that he uses it, which, just like experience, we can say, so to speak. Phenomenal
Bernardo Kastrup: consciousness is that whose excitations are experiences.
Andrea Hiott: Right. But for me, this gets very confusing, especially when someone like a scientist is writing about it about a subject, because phenomenal consciousness can also often be used to in dialogue or in papers to already mean something like re representation or representation.
Because here's the thing, right? The baby, what comes into the world, it is experience. It's not necessarily having experience. I mean, in the, cause already when we use that kind of language, we've, you know, we've Set something against itself. Do you know what I mean? So there's almost, for me, a difficulty in what you might call , this kind of nestedness of the way that we have to speak about it. And we, we can't always catch ourselves, if you know what I mean. So. Yeah. Have you, do you know, does that make sense? I just find this is even trickier than it seems, even after we've [00:12:00] unpacked it in the way you have.
Bernardo Kastrup: Of course, people will tell themselves that if they can't report their experiences to themselves, then they are not having those experiences.
Well, in fact, they may be having. In, in, in Ned Block's terminology, what we call metaconsciousness would be phenomenal consciousness plus access consciousness together. When we have those two things together, then that's what we mean by metaconsciousness. Metaconsciousness in your science of consciousness in philosophy, phenomenal consciousness does not require representation, does not require the explicitly aware, explicit awareness that you are having an experience.
Um, You know, I, my friend Christoph Koch has a different opinion on what I'm about to say, but I still hold on to my own opinion. I think at least some cases of, um, um, blind sight. It's when an individual acts as though he's seeing. Like, if you throw a ball at the individual, he or she will catch that ball, but he will report to you [00:13:00] that I couldn't see the ball, it's just that my hand moved and it happened to catch the ball.
I think that at least some of those cases of blind sightness reflect this distinction between consciousness and metaconsciousness. The subject is conscious of seeing the ball. He or she is experiencing the ball but that experience is not re represented. So if you ask the subject, the subject would tell you, no, I didn't see anything.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that makes me think of Gonzaga and those left brain right brain kind of studies when the corpus callosum was severed. And, yeah, that would be a whole other subject. It also makes me think of seeing without eyes. I just, Had another talk somewhere else about with Alex Gomez Marin or Marin Gomez.
I always get it confused, right? Yeah, and um, we were we were talking about that of so yeah I guess I just feel like even that can get confusing because the body is itself already sensing and so are we going to talk about any [00:14:00] body that sensing is already experiencing and so let's go to the child coming into the world, that's why I wanted to start it like this. As we, we agree the body comes in, it's sensing, , is that a kind of consciousness for you? Because I really want to get to you, what you wrote about Jung, too, and the unconscious.
It's very hard for me to understand, How something can be unconscious is it still mental, but it's just unconscious for that subject or these kinds of things So you can see where I'm sort of trying to get to you.
Bernardo Kastrup: Okay, let's start very quickly just to clarify the terminology You could define sensing is not, not necessarily entailing experience.
So a camera senses something, but it's not experiencing what it's sensing. If you define sensing that way, then no, sensing does not necessarily come with experience. But a child, I think, doesn't just sense. A child experiences what is sensed, even though the child may not [00:15:00] metacognize that experience. A child may not be able to tell itself.
I am experiencing this right now. Um, Sorry to
Andrea Hiott: stop you, but what's the difference there? Because I feel like i'm missing What what's the difference between? The child is the sensing right? It's the body. It's sensing It doesn't have a sense of self like a subject or even if we don't know if it does we let's assume It's building that right through Sensing i'm glad you made that point about sensing because often in circles with computer You People who are in engineering they use sensors in a completely different way and it can get very confusing So I definitely mean how the any body and embodied creature is experiencing the world through that body
Bernardo Kastrup: I'm not talking about experiencing perceptual contents without perceptual organs. I'm not talking about that. I think that's theoretically a lot more complicated if it happens at all.
From the point of view of the reporting ego, [00:16:00] the absence of metacognition, the absence of re representation is identical to the absence of experience, because the reporting ego operates at a metacognitive level. Whatever is not represented does not reach that level. So from the point, from the point of view of the reporting ego, it might as well never have happened.
For instance, for the past two minutes, you have been experiencing your breathing, but from the point of view of your reporting ego, you cannot tell the difference because that experience of breathing was not being represented. So you might as well not have breathed the past two minutes yet. We know that you did.
You would have passed that? Well, maybe not. I could hold my breath four and a half minutes once. No way. I definitely couldn't.
Andrea Hiott: So, , you can assume once upon a time,
Bernardo Kastrup: 20 years ago when I was very much into diving, oh yeah. I
Andrea Hiott: was a diver too, but still no way.
Bernardo Kastrup: Um, [00:17:00] you can talk about that. It's a part of my life that I miss.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, I would love to talk about that that experience of being underwater so there has to be an ego to be conscious
Bernardo Kastrup: A
Andrea Hiott: reporting ego to be conscious. I thought you don't
Bernardo Kastrup: The reporting ego cannot tell the difference between the absence of experience and the absence of re representation of the experience
Andrea Hiott: Okay, but the child or the body that's come into the world doesn't necessarily have a sense, like an ego yet, but it's still experiencing, it's still conscious, right?
Bernardo Kastrup: Well, according to the research you quoted in the very beginning, from five years on, they have a reporting ego. Right, but that's the whole point. Until
Andrea Hiott: five years, they don't, but they're still conscious. Which is what you kind of make a case for. So for me, that means you can't really dissociate it from the body.
Once you start with calling it a subject or it calling itself a subject, you're, you're starting that process. But just even if we start in the womb, wherever you want to [00:18:00] start, the body's encounter, which I'm saying is sensory through what all parts, all senses, you can choose one. Um, the eyes, the nose, whatever, the skin, um, proprioception, that sensing for me feels like or whatever we want to call it, experience and consciousness.
That's not the
Bernardo Kastrup: only type of experience. You can also have experience without intentional content, experience that is purely endogenous. But just to finally answer your previous question, the reporting ego cannot see a difference between unconsciousness and consciousness. An experience that is not re represented, but obviously there is in one case something is being experienced in the other case It's not you were experiencing your breathing for the prior two minutes.
It's different than if you were If, if there were no experience of breathing at all, now for how can we gain, we know this objectively in cases like blindsight and other cases that you see in the no report paradigm in [00:19:00] neuroscience, which sort of began in 2015 with Tsushiya, um, you can see these cases where there is this dissociation between experience, raw experience and reportability.
Um, but to gain direct first person insight into it, one has to pay attention to one's own inner life. For instance, um, to me, um, many years ago, there was a moment I, I realized that I knew something that I didn't know I knew. Not only that, I had known it for years before.
Andrea Hiott: Can you tell me what, or it's too, because I know what you mean, but No, it has to do
Bernardo Kastrup: with the life of somebody else.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
Bernardo Kastrup: So, I don't mind telling you everything about my life, but No, I understand.
Andrea Hiott: I wouldn't want to do that either. But you just recognized that you'd been operating with that knowledge.
Bernardo Kastrup: Or, okay, this I can talk more directly about. I can go for a couple of days in pain [00:20:00] without knowing that I am in pain. And then when I, when my attention finally falls onto the pain and I re represent it, then retroactively I know, oh, I have been having, having this experience for the past couple of days.
But during those days, I didn't know I had it. Another experience you can have in dreams. We know this from a study by Jennifer Vint and others years ago, 2007. Dreams tend to be a lot less metacognitive than waking life. In dreams, we tend to experience without knowing that we are Experiencing. And that's precisely the reason why absurd things can happen in dreams without alarming us.
It's because we experiencing absurd things, but we are not telling ourselves that we experiencing them. So it doesn't trigger that rational processing way. Wait a moment. How can this be happening? No. So these are ways in which you can satisfy yourself from a point, first person point [00:21:00] of view that there can be such a thing as.
Experience in the absence of reportability or or metaconsciousness
Andrea Hiott: It reminds me of sometimes when you're walking down the street, of course, you're seeing everything But you're not aware that you're seeing it. Do you know what I mean? Like it just reminds me the other day someone asked me where something was and I had no idea I knew where it was, but once I asked the question I i'd somehow seen that even though I didn't know i'd seen it
Bernardo Kastrup: If you commute a lot by car if you drive Frequently to work or or back home.
Sometimes you arrive in your garage and you realize You don't remember how you got there. You don't remember the drive at all. Were you unconscious during the drive? Of course not. You were conscious, but you were not metacognitive of the experience of driving because you were mulling your problems or you were thinking about something else.
It doesn't mean that you were unconscious of your driving. It only means that you didn't re represent it. And by the way, memory formation has a lot to do with re [00:22:00] representation. So, Um, things that we don't re represent, we don't remember, we don't form memory pathways to lead us back to that. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: this is so fascinating.
I'm glad you brought that example up because I think that's a great example. And the thing, I, maybe this can unpack what I'm confused about or what I'm trying to bring up here because like in that, when we, we all know that feeling of driving or even walking and you're so, so to speak, lost in thought, you really don't remember it, but then you do come back online.
So. You kind of can say, yeah, I was, I was there, obviously, because I moved from point A to point B and here I am and, and so on. But that was still consciousness, obviously. Well, I guess what I'm saying is we start that way. Um, in that state, we don't have all this kind of language attached to our habits and thought and images and so on, probably, because we've just kind of entered.
But for me, that's a similar state. It's, it's still consciousness. So is, is that different for you? The baby being born and the.
Bernardo Kastrup: No, it's experience. It's consciousness. Yeah, yeah, okay. It's not metaconsciousness. The [00:23:00] difference is
Andrea Hiott: that you come back online and you know that A and B are connected from where you started to where you are and the baby's kind of still developing how to come back online or how to come online at all.
Bernardo Kastrup: Metaconsciousness is coming online. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And would you say that's kind of dissociation in your use of that term, consciousness dissociating from
Bernardo Kastrup: itself? No, because there were, in the case of an infant, there was never an association to begin with. So we cannot speak of a dissociation. But the
Andrea Hiott: consciousness, right?
And then your mom and dad tell you your name and you start to realize, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm You start to see that other people see you as a subject and then you see yourself as a subject to me. That feels a lot like dissociation before there was something like you don't need the subject to know it was a subject for the dissociation to occur which I feel like you prove in other ways or you you lay out very well in other another sense but maybe I'm confusing this nestedness.
Bernardo Kastrup: Phenomenologically I understand why you are tempted to use the word dissociation. Technically I [00:24:00] wouldn't use it because it doesn't refer to the same mechanisms. that we allude to when we talk of dissociation. For instance, under IIT, dissociation has to do with the exclusion principle of integrated information theory, and it's not related to what you said.
But phenomenologically, I understand the temptation.
Andrea Hiott: Well, it's still, it's still the same regularities if you want to think mathematically, right? The body is still the same regularities when it comes into the world. Of course, they're changing like over time and growing and so on, but there's a pattern of regularity that's still the same that then becomes aware of itself.
So that pattern of regularity to me is sort of dissociated from itself in order to become aware of itself. This is very Hegelian sounding now. Okay. I understand what you mean.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yes. Yes.
Meta conscious. There is no dissociation. It's just the infant being the infant, experiencing the world without re representing its own experiences, without recognizing itself as a subject distinct from its [00:25:00] experiences. The infant is in what Freud called oceanic consciousness. Right, or pure consciousness
Andrea Hiott: even, or some kind of, there's a form of regularity to it.
But yeah,
Bernardo Kastrup: yeah, there is a, there is a quality to, to that. And then when you start developing metaconsciousness, um, you start to the, it's like you, you created the mechanism of attention and evolutionarily, um, that's a very precious resource. What you place your attention on mobilizes a lot of cognitive resources.
So that has to be used sparingly. And what happens is that when you're paying attention to something, everything that is not in your field of attention sort of falls away out of metacognition. And metacognition has a glow. It has a psychic strength. It's that it obfuscates everything else that is not being metacognized like if you are If you are if you tend to ruminate a lot, so you place your attention to your thoughts and [00:26:00] your default mode network
Andrea Hiott: Beautiful to say it has a glow because it is like that.
It's almost kind of What's the, it's almost like heightening itself or something.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. It's like, it's like the sun in the noon sky. It has a glow that obfuscates the other stars. The other stars are still there. Their photons are still impinging on your retina. That impingement is still creating electromagnetic impulses that will go to your, to your visual cortex, to V1.
But You are not explicitly aware of the stars because the glow of the sun obfuscates everything else The same with the field of attention the field of metacognition it obfuscates everything else. It's a very precious Evolutionary resource so it has to be used sparingly because of that and as a consequence There is a lot of stuff going on in our minds that we cannot be Metaconscious of because it would take our eyes off the ball of survival if you know what I mean Oh, yeah.
It's impossible for us. It would be
Andrea Hiott: overwhelming.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Bernardo Kastrup: [00:27:00] So, and that's the reason why there's a lot more going on in our phenomenal consciousness than the reporting ego will ever know.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's like this blooming, buzzing confusion thing, right? You're just sort of totally immersed in it. And I think when people do psych, when we do psychedelics or something, we get a little hint of that again, of that we haven't patterned our regularity, so we're just whoa.
And it, it is kind of too much. You can't really go shopping like that at the grocery store because you get completely amazed by the broccoli or something. You know? It doesn't work for normal life, so.
Bernardo Kastrup: If you look at the mechanism of, of action, of psychedelics, what is the, the main feature that we observe in the brain of a person under a psychedelic drug?
Lots of things happen, but the main, most obvious measurable thing is a reduction in brain activities, especially in the default mode network, which has to do with this looping mechanisms of attention. That activity is re, is repressed, so. You have a solar eclipse and [00:28:00] suddenly you can see the stars at noon, but the stars were always there.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, exactly. It's, it's beautiful. It's an incredible kind of thing to contemplate, but speaking of that, I would like to know when you started to contemplate it. Um, like when did you, as a child, begin to, I won't say dissociate from yourself because that's too, doesn't sound right, but in the sense that I just meant, start to become aware of yourself as a subject.
Become metaconscious, I guess.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, I think I was around nine years old Um, I remember it clearly because it was a major moment a major developing my development in my life an anomaly for six months or so Um, the thought would come to me like oh, wow I am not the world. I am not the houses, the trees, the other people.
I'm not that. I am here. And that stuff is there. I am not [00:29:00] that. And I experienced this thought as an amazing thing. Uncanny, incredible. It's incredible.
Andrea Hiott: Like, very exciting. You would have to say.
Bernardo Kastrup: Kind of, yeah. Well, it's like I couldn't believe it, but I, it had to be true. And I would have to say. you were
Andrea Hiott: seeing some kind of alien creature or something, or that kind of a thing.
Yeah, like worse
Bernardo Kastrup: than that. Worse than
Andrea Hiott: that.
Bernardo Kastrup: I would get a cold shiver going down my spine, a very physical feeling, like you feel that electric vibration that traverses your spine, downward. I know exactly what you mean. Mm hmm. And for a period of six months or so, every time I would have the thought, I would feel this electric thing, like an uncanny, amazing stuff, and then I habituated and it became normal.
Andrea Hiott: Do you have any idea what could have started that? Did you, I mean, I know it's almost impossible, but you don't remember, like, is it because for me, I remember it was my brother being brought home from the [00:30:00] hospital that I started to realize, , I guess because, it changes the family dynamics and I mean, I just remember him, the way it looked like the light kind of on him, they put him on the floor and his little whatever you call these little things to carry babies around.
And, um, and he was just sitting there in the light and it was just kind of this weird moment of Oh, that's not me, and it felt like what you described this. How old were you? almost too, too much, you know, um, that was three. He's three years younger than me,
Bernardo Kastrup: it happened very early for you.
Jung had it at nine. He wrote, he wrote about it in his biography. Sorry, Jung had it at 11. I had it at nine. Yeah. It's a very uncanny realization. If you ask me what brought it about, I think it was just culture. You get, you know, you're absorbed into the culture and you start believing the cultural narratives and the cultural narratives tell you the absurdity that you're separate from the world, which is of course absurd under any [00:31:00] metaphysics, idealism, physicalism.
Dualism, maybe not, but under any monism, it is absurd, um, but we, you know, the whole culture operates under this absurdity that we are separate from the world.
Andrea Hiott: But do you think it does some kind of work for us that, because, you know, what we're talking about now is also really important in our lives in terms of, at least to me, like that moment was scary and it, it's kind of, I don't been awful in a way to wake up to the fact that you've been told who you are and then you have to figure out what that story was that everyone told you and then figure out if you really want to be that story like this whole thing but at the same time All of that was the reason I could now look back at that story and change it, you know what I mean?
And also be kind of present and aware and in the world in a particular way, so,
Bernardo Kastrup: yeah. There's an obvious evolutionary advantage for our identifying ourselves as a subject apart from the world, because if we didn't, we wouldn't care for our survival. Mm. If we are the [00:32:00] tiger that is coming to eat us and the tiger is hungry, well the tiger's got to eat and off we go,
So it's a evolutionary advantages and, and, and that it's no wonder that the culture evolved around this evolutionary advantage. Is it true? No. No. Unless you are a dualist, it cannot be true. It's just not true. It's useful, but it's a convenient fiction.
Andrea Hiott: But don't you think there's something to that too, that it's very hard to really grasp that in the same way we were talking about earlier of, we can't really sense all there is in the world because it's too overwhelming.
I think there's something about that realization that can be really difficult, right? That in both ways, like it can be difficult because you want to believe the story that you've kind of created of yourself or that you're different from everyone else. , but it can also be different because. It just sort of throws into question all other things that you've assumed to be true [00:33:00]
Bernardo Kastrup: in terms of An example.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I'm not, I guess I'm thinking more about people who would hold very tightly to a scientific worldview like materialism, or to Because you want to know the truth and you want to know there's definite, um, separations between things and it can be very unsettling to try to think of that differently if you've learned that paradigm, right?
It can feel, this is why people get so angry about it, right? And they think it's, they call it all kind of names and stuff when you, because the language itself has already separated those things. to the point where it's even hard to talk about without getting someone angry if they've built their worldview on that separation.
Does that make sense?
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. There is, of course, the psychological dynamics underlying the development of physicalism which is very easy to understand. The psychological payoff of physicalism is, is, is clear. It's it's historically visible and it's present today [00:34:00] for the same reasons. Um, but it comes at a price as you're saying, um, so we have this payoff as you were saying, we have a payoff.
I think the payoff goes beyond just getting used to it. I think the payoff has to do with dealing with that. Because if you're a physicalist when you're dead, then there is, there is nobody there to experience what happens afterwards. And the fear of what people will experience after they die is what allowed, for instance, an institution without an army, like the Catholic Church, to completely control the continent of Europe for a thousand years.
So that has been the single greatest fear of humankind. What will I experience after I'm dead? And that greatest fear in history is off the table with physicalism. Reminds me
Andrea Hiott: too, of that shiver feeling, right? Because that's part of it too. When you start to realize you're not the world as you realized as a little kid, kind of soon have to realize
Bernardo Kastrup: you come to an end.
Andrea Hiott: You come to an end [00:35:00] and things you love come to an end and
Bernardo Kastrup: that's the price we pay. The price you pay is nihilism. So it's the absence of meaning I've, um, this is a secondhand quote, but I was giving an interview the other day and the host quoted Yuval Harari as saying life has no meaning. All it can give you is drugs and video games.
So that, that's, you know, I respected. Historian. He's not a neuroscientist. He's not a philosopher, so he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's repeating the mantra of the mainstream, so he deserves forgiveness for that. He's not an expert in the field, but, um, the mantra he repeated reflects the price, psychological price we pay.
Um, but the gain overcomes that price, or at least historically since middle of the 19th century, the gain has been stronger than the price we pay. That dynamics is changing now because we now take the gain for granted. We no longer realize that our absence of the price. Fear [00:36:00] about what will happen after we are dead.
We fear the process of death. We don't fear what will happen after um that that is is not a given that is actually derived from a certain metaphysical position called physicalism Which is It's entirely untenable. It's the greatest bullshit ever to be taken seriously by any rational culture in the history of the planet.
But we take it for granted. So we think it's banked. It's in the pocket already. And now the problem we have to deal with is nihilism, is the demeaning crisis, as John Verveke put it.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, this is really powerful because, , first of all, we need to go back because there was a time when You did buy into all this, right?
Or not even buy into all of it, but you were sort of materialist and physicalist and, and so on. Or, or
Bernardo Kastrup: inertia because everybody around me was, and I was not really paying much attention to metaphysics. I wanted to do physics. And now my first job was at CERN and I was much [00:37:00] preoccupied with the Higgs boson and Susie supersymmetry.
I didn't have cycles left in my processor to worry about metaphysics, but I never was a physicalist. Thinkingly, in the sense that whenever Affirmed physicalism out of a conclusion that I arrived at myself through my own thinking process. The moment I started explicitly thinking about that, it became rather quickly clear to me that physicalism is entirely untenable.
Andrea Hiott: So I want to think about, so I think of you as already like a little philosopher in a way, because I know the story about you finding Jung, because you tell it, um, the I Ching, which already you were being drawn to the I Ching. And then of course you had I
Bernardo Kastrup: didn't know what the I Ching was actually. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: but you noticed it.
We were just talking about the glow of metaconsciousness. So obviously there were zillions of books there. There were probably a lot of other opportunities and you focused on that one. And then Jung did the preface and you focused on that. So [00:38:00] to me, that sounds like a little Bit of a person who's a little philosophically inclined and I know there's reasons for that and maybe we can go into it like for why you That book in that time period but what's interesting to me is I saw these really cool computers that you're making these like I can't remember all their names, but they're so cool like retro weird um microprocessors that kind of are wiring themselves and they just look wonderful and so I read like one of your blogs on there and it says that You When you were a kid, you really wanted to build a computer, right?
So I really want to understand that, unpack that part of you a bit, because for me coming out of philosophy and neuroscience and so on, you know, there's this computational mind and everything's a computer. And it sounds like you would have been in that mindset of, okay, I want to, if you're trying to understand the world, but you're obviously really drawn to computers and you wanted to create a computer.
So. And you were philosophically inclined. So I'm trying to, [00:39:00] you know, those were, were you assuming maybe if you understood how to make a computer, you would understand intelligence in a way?
Bernardo Kastrup: Oh, definitely. I I actually didn't change my mind about that yet.
Andrea Hiott: Okay.
Bernardo Kastrup: I think intelligence is an objectively measurable property.
It's about how cleverly you can manipulate data in order to solve a problem that does not require the presence of a private conscious point of view accompanying those computations that we refer to as intelligence. That's wonderful.
Andrea Hiott: I mean, I want you to keep going, but that's exactly what I was hoping to try to unstick intelligence, cognition and consciousness mind.
These also get kind of lumped together. But first, please, like the computer.
Bernardo Kastrup: Is a is a is a. That's a strange word. It is. Because it seems to require awareness. Intelligence, I think it's It's better. It can decouple it from awareness completely. I
Andrea Hiott: agree. Yeah. But, so, why, so you wanted to build a computer and can you, was [00:40:00] that disappointing in some way or?
Was it wonderful? And then you just decided, Oh, now I'm going to kind of start thinking about philosophy, or I know you went back and got your philosophy degree. It's super cool that you did that. And you, I saw that you put your defense online, which is just really cool that you did that. Just as someone who went back to school a little bit later, I think it gives people.
It's a good gift that you're giving. Um, yeah, but so what happened? Like, why, why couldn't you figure it out with the computer or are you still figuring it out with the computer? The intelligence
Bernardo Kastrup: part. Well, I have a workbench here behind me. Yeah, it
Andrea Hiott: looks great.
Bernardo Kastrup: Where I design and restore, um, computers.
I restore old computers and design brand new computers. Um,
Andrea Hiott: so cool. And it's just, I guess it would you're kind of an anomaly for me in a way because I don't often come. in contact with people who are so much connected to the computers and also Would start analytic [00:41:00] idealism like to me that's holding, you know, it's wrong.
It's not it's not true It's not holding, um opposites in any way because as you know mind and matter and all these Intelligence, but it's something very deep to already understand early on, right?
Bernardo Kastrup: You see a seeming contradiction there A dichotomy
Andrea Hiott: at least the world would be telling you So
Bernardo Kastrup: yeah, I'm not going to attempt to give you a neat story that brings it all together.
No, it wouldn't be
Andrea Hiott: true. Probably. So
Bernardo Kastrup: I don't have that neat story of myself. I harbor contradictions within myself. And this is one of them. I love to Play with the purely mechanistic aspect of a computer, because a computer is entirely Reliable in the sense that it's predictable. If you know what you're doing, the computer will do what you want it to do.
Unless you made a mistake. If it's not doing [00:42:00] what you wanted it to do, you made a mistake. There is a clarity to that. Um, that that I love, um, and I think you were right that the, the quality, the, the, the feeling tone associated with designing incredibly complicated mechanisms seems to be dichotomous with the feeling and the tone of contemplating the great metaphysical questions.
Um, if. If that is a dichotomy, I harbor that dichotomy in me and I shall make no attempt to recreate it.
Andrea Hiott: I actually don't think it's a dichotomy because dichotomy, you know, is cutting things apart. And I actually think we've cut it apart in a way that in a way similar to the way materialism and these other things have sort of cut things apart in order to understand them in the way that you just described the computer, I guess was what I'm trying to connect there is because all this for me is more like a paradox that you can hold and, and even.
And then you realize it's not a [00:43:00] paradox kind of in a, in a wider sense, it's not something that you can cut in half because then it's not the thing anymore. So it's not a dichotomy. It's beyond it. But I guess what I'm trying to get at is you were literally modeling things, right? You, you were working in some of the best places that were modeling things as scientists, and you were creating, trying to create computers.
That's like what I really think of as representation of modeling. To understand and there's a kind of control and an agency that is very attractive and would for me be a reason why We might end up with that quote that you just gave Like if you take that too seriously And that becomes the only way you can know truth or know what's real if you can model it then you end up with If everything is material in that way, do you know what I mean?
Bernardo Kastrup: Not necessarily. I think the problem there is that we mistake our models for reality. We mistake our theoretical [00:44:00] entities, which are convenient fictions, we mistake them for the ontological structure of the world. And there is nothing in science that requires that. Um, all that is required in science is that you develop.
Convenient fictions, in terms of which you can make correct predictions about what nature will do next, the convenient fictions themselves do not need to be true, and they have never been true. For instance, um, there was a time in the Middle Ages when scientists were trying to account for, well, that's pre scientific thought, proto scientific thought.
They were trying to account for electrostatic attraction. Why would ember be pulled into a rod of, sorry, why would shaft be pulled into a rod of ember if you rubbed that rod of ember? So they hypothesized that there is this elastic, invisible substance called the fluvium, which is like a sticky, like chewing gum, gum, connecting the shaft to the rod of ember.
And and then when you [00:45:00] release the shaft, it just gets, the elastic pulls the shaft back to the rod. Um, nevermind the fact that it, this couldn't at all account for electrostatic repulsion, only for attraction, and that we could never measure this effluvium directly, we only could measure its effects.
Later on, we kept on playing the same game. Um, when Faraday came around and he proposed electromagnetic fields here again was something that was only known in so far as its effects. The field is a modeling tool. We never, we never grab the field. All we can do is measure its effects like just like we could measure shaft going flying to a rod of amber.
And, and then we replaced those. The electromagnetic fields of Faraday, well, we still have one, but now we have 17 quantum fields. And we can only know about their existence because of their effects. We have no direct [00:46:00] access to the fields themselves. In other words, all this stuff are convenient fictions.
Newton postulated this invisible force that acted at a distance between celestial bodies and brought them together, called gravity, an invisible force acting instantaneously at a distance. The French laughed of Newton for 50 years. Because they thought invisible forces acting at a distance, it's woo woo, it's magical stuff.
And sure enough, around came Einstein and said, bullshit, there are no such invisible forces. What there is, is the invisible fabric of space time that bends and twists. And now with loop quantum gravity, no, no, no, no, no, it's not that. There is some other convenient fiction. So, We have always created convenient fictions that help us predict what nature will do next, and these convenient fictions have never been true in and of themselves.
They are just modeling tools. You become a physicalist when you mistake a convenient fiction for a truth. That's the error you [00:47:00] make.
Andrea Hiott: Or even a model for the present. Thing being modeled, which is something I think happens a lot, right? which is what I was actually trying to get to um, it's wonderful that you went there because it's exactly that confusion of map and territory or The model with what we're trying to model that I think has become very hard to see for a lot of people Does that make sense to you?
Absolutely.
Bernardo Kastrup: I think this, this this permeates society at all levels, not only in science. It permeates, for instance, our political views.
We have a model of what's going on, and we take that model. Or reality and we act accordingly even at geopolitical levels, for instance Arguably the greatest evildoer in the world today on our present, ages, hitler vladimir vladimirovich, putin He engages in mystical [00:48:00] thinking. That's very easy to see based on his pronouncements, the way he talks about history, the way he talks about Mother Russia today, and the future of the Slavic peoples.
He is Taken over by mystical thinking, he takes the, for instance, the entity Russia, he takes it to be a real entity that is somehow separate from its people, and that's why he can throw the Russian people to the front lines as cannon fodder and have them all killed, because that's for the benefit of this other entity, Russia.
That it somehow is separate from its people. Of course, there is no such entity. Russia exists only so far as there are Russian people and Russian lands in the hands of is not
Andrea Hiott: the common perception, right? In any country. I mean, I think it really connects to that, the way that we almost assume dualism in a way.
I
Bernardo Kastrup: mean, look, yeah, somebody I just criticized, I will praise now. Yuval Harari [00:49:00] wrote a book about it years ago. So, our entire mode of. cooperating with other human beings is based on taking fictions for fact. For instance, we believe money has value.
Paper. If you burn it, it will give you a couple of calories.
It will hardly warm you up. At best you can clean yourself with it. You can't eat it. You can't drink it. It will not protect you from the elements. It's absolutely valueless. And yet we all go for money because we established this convenient fiction that money has value. And therefore we trade it. We believe in that fiction.
Otherwise, why would you give a perfectly good car to somebody in exchange for a pile of paper? Nobody would do that! Everybody has to believe the fiction. Otherwise, it wouldn't work. Everybody has to believe in the fictions of nation states. I'm not saying that we shouldn't. We should operationally believe these fictions.
But if we believe them [00:50:00] ultimately, and now we are making a mistake, because now it's like taking a metaphor way beyond its applicability. Operationally, there has to be the state of the Netherlands. Okay? I don't want that operational belief to disappear. Otherwise, we will be in trouble here as Dutch people.
We live in a country in which if we just strike the entire country for a couple of weeks, half the country is under water. So we can't do that, right? We have to believe in the fiction of the Dutch nation state. But if we ultimately believe. In, in nation states, in money, um, and many other, or the, the, the, the theoretical entities of science.
Now we are fooling ourselves and it's never a good thing to fool ourselves.
Andrea Hiott: I think what you just said is kind of the most important thing we might all need to learn in a way. And it seems very hard to learn it that, and what I mean is that. We can model [00:51:00] things, and we can name things, and we can do all the structure and scaffolding via representation, external representation, I mean, not like in our brain.
Um, and that's very important, but it's not real in the sense of, it's a process, it's just our way of understanding a process, right? Correct. And, and, and, look,
Bernardo Kastrup: People listening to this realize they make this mistake. Well, at least you're in very good company, because a lot of people with the letters Ph.
D. Suffixing their names, make this mistake. Specialist science communicators, they make this mistake a lot. They are not even scientists. They are not doing science. They're only talking about it. So they miss out on the subtleties and nuances that people make. practical scientists are confronting every day.
People who are actually doing science, they hit upon, you know, they hit with their noses against the limitations of science. They're modeling. [00:52:00] They realize that you can only stretch a model so far. But even
Andrea Hiott: then, don't you sometimes take it for literal, without meaning to? I'm thinking of in neuroscience labs, when we look at these pictures of brains with little things lighting up in them.
There's a way in which sometimes we really take them as brains. You know, like it's almost like, this is not a pipe, that picture we need to see, this is not a brain because you just, like, there's some kind of, it's really nuanced and hard not to do this as what I mean in daily life. It's, I think it's even at the root of a lot of meditative practices or the reason we did to take psychedelics, some of us who would, you know, like when you're really trying to explore mine, because I think it becomes very hard not to confuse map and territory, I guess is what I'm saying.
Cause it's so nested and so rich. Richly interwoven.
Bernardo Kastrup: It's the unique thing about humans, is the ability to create a map and then mistake it for the territory. There is one thing that is worse than, at least if we are [00:53:00] consistent, we make less mistakes. Even if we believe in something that is not true, but we are consistent in that belief, we make less mistakes.
The problem is that often, we are not even consistent. in a false belief. For instance, it's becoming mainstream in neuroscience now, um, the understanding that, , the reality we think we perceive is a modulated hallucination. It is something concocted by the brain, um, as an, as an entity separate from the mind, which is itself already absurd.
I think the brain is what the mind looks like. It's not what produces the mind, but let's, let's at least be consistent in that mistake. The brain is an entity that produces the mind and it's also producing the hallucination that we call the world. Now this comes from ideas, um, give you one example of a person who talks about it frequently and it is a [00:54:00] new set.
He talks about it frequently, reality being a controlled hallucination, it's a construction of the brain.
Andrea Hiott: Being You, I guess, is the book, right, that sort of makes that argument, in a way.
Bernardo Kastrup: Maybe. From
Andrea Hiott: him, yeah. Who, who,
Bernardo Kastrup: who did you say?
Andrea Hiott: Anil Seth, this book, I think it's called, like, Being You, that's, it's like, I just, what you're saying really resonates with me, because I think it's become, I've seen like younger kids of my friends starting to sort of take this view of, oh, it's all a hallucination, and it's very connected to that nihilistic, kind of, quote.
Sense too and it's very sexy though in a way
Bernardo Kastrup: if you go all the way you make less mistakes because the mistake then people Make is to take the brain away from that reality Does it that is hallucinated is to to say no, the brain is not a hallucination Everything else is a hallucination of the brain, but the brain is not.
Well, why? The brain is an object, just like everything else. It's something that appears to perception. So if you maintain that the reality we perceive is a hallucination, it's [00:55:00] concocted by something, then the brain is part of that hallucination. The brain, too, is being concocted by something. So if you persist in your error consistently, Eventually, you realize what you did.
The problem is that we are not even consistent in that error. And, and, and that's when, when things really become messy.
Andrea Hiott: Is that, I took you away, but that, yeah, so that you were saying that's how we start taking the map for the territory or confusing the two in a way, right? That makes sense to me that we.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, physicalism is a prime example of this.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, so what is it, I guess, like to try to go back to you, I had this kind of narrative I'm just realizing that maybe you were working as a computer in this world CERN and all this, you know, very, um, successful, I think you started businesses and I know you were really, really successful.
You still are, you're still doing it, which is kind of the realization I'm [00:56:00] having now, because I know you have this AI thing now, but I'd kind of imagined you'd just gotten sick of it or something and decided Okay, like I'm just going to throw materialism away and go get my PhD and become a philosopher.
But of course, I know that it wasn't like that. You were already a philosopher in a way, because you were writing these articles like the Scientific American one that I brought up. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is like, how did all this come together? Did you reject materialism? Was there a moment where you did kind of knowledge by, um, acquaintance of idealism?
Or, I mean, was there a moment where it became very clear to you that this story that we've been expressing in different ways was harmful or it needed a counterbalance?
Bernardo Kastrup: Well, just, just let me first just address, I think, a suggestion that you made. Maybe you don't, even without intending. The fact that I'm Starting another company now, an AI company, it doesn't mean that I'm back to materialism or physicalism.
Andrea Hiott: No, not at all. That's, that's what I'm saying. I was making this distinction [00:57:00] as if those worlds were two, you know, you already were holding all these things together, right? Like over time, but I was sort of putting them in as if you chose one, like suddenly you realized, okay, no materialism.
Now I'm, idealism is the way or yeah.
Bernardo Kastrup: Oh, okay, that happened. Physicalism has not been a part of my life for many years now. It's a, it's a, it's a fiction that is lost. It's a time in my, in my memory. Right, but
Andrea Hiott: it doesn't mean computers haven't been, is what I'm saying. Of course not. Whether
Bernardo Kastrup: it's physical or ideal or anything else.
Yeah, exactly. This thing we experience and we call computers still exist and they're still as cool as they were before. Maybe cooler. Yeah, and you're
Andrea Hiott: still making them and making stuff out of them. Yeah, exactly. I just, it's one of those things like you brought up a minute ago. So I wanted to go where you, I didn't know I was thinking that till just now and then I realized, oh.
Bernardo Kastrup: Look, for an idealist, the world doesn't cease to exist. It's just that the idealist accounts for that world in a [00:58:00] different way, a more sane way. But the world's still there and I'm still alive and I'm still up to having fun. Yeah, but for
Andrea Hiott: people listening, I'm sort of assuming they know, but so we've been talking about this materialist point of view.
And of course, you've started. A kind of revolution, I guess, around like metaphysical idealism, right? Because not too long ago it was just like, oh yeah, everything is monist, everything is physicalist, everything is materialist, you don't talk about consciousness, you don't talk about, , you basically, I'm talking in the scientific circles, right?
Yeah. And now that's changed a lot for a lot of different reasons. But, um, so just for people listening, they probably already know, but, you know, that's what I'm trying to bring up here is this, obviously you weren't satisfied with materialism and I'm trying to understand kind of why.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. Well, um, when that, did that begin to happen?
Um, when I was at CERN, um, I was in, you know, The early team, the, the first team that started working on [00:59:00] what would become the experiments of the LHC, the Atlas, the CMS and a couple of, a couple of other smaller experiments. I was in the Atlas team and um, we were doing the triggers. So Cool.
Andrea Hiott: Were you getting shivers then, like
I mean, was it cool sometimes to just think , okay, I'm here in this world when this is happening? Incredibly. In exactly this moment. It's such a wave. You are just right at the right moment.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, it blew my mind that my first job was my dream job. Yeah, I, I was, I was having, I was really in for a ride at CERN.
I was when I landed there and it was, I finished my, my, yeah, the work experience stage, I finished it there. And then I started as a, as a, no, I was officially working for CERN. I was 22.
Andrea Hiott: Oh my God.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. So no
Andrea Hiott: wonder you hardly could, were old enough to have thought much about materialism.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, no, I was having too much fun you know, working on that.
And what we were doing, we were doing the data [01:00:00] acquisition system, or the calorimeter, one of the detectors in the ATLAS experiment. And we needed to have a computer system that was intelligent enough to look at the data coming in, and within 25 nanoseconds, make a decision. Is this potentially new physics?
Is this the Higgs boson or is this old physics? Because we had to throw away 98 percent of the data. It's the thing produces terabytes per second, so you can't store everything. And even if you could, offline analysis would take lifetimes. So you have to very quickly decide what you want to keep and what you want to throw away.
And then we developed a system based on our understanding of physics. But in parallel, I developed with some partners in crime, I developed a neural network, an artificial neural network. Of course it was the first option that was selected because at the time AI was considered a black box, but we knew that the neural network performed just as well, just as well as the [01:01:00] physicists understanding of the data.
Andrea Hiott: And that was not commonly thought at that moment at all, right?
Bernardo Kastrup: Well, people knew neural networks could do a lot, um, but, you know, we didn't have computers fast enough to really bring us beyond just three layers. So feature extraction, we had to do by, we had to do by hand. Now we have deep learning. So you do, you do nothing by hand, right?
Network has multiple layers. It's a different time. I feel like that
Andrea Hiott: was a time when people thought it was limited or, you know, Kind of had done its thing or something, or was this just before that?
Bernardo Kastrup: The main issue we had at the time was one, scalability. It was we didn't have computers that were fast enough.
And two, um, it was considered a black box. We didn't have the visualization tools we have today. That show you, you know, the cuts in the hyperdimensional space where the thing is being evaluated. So you see what the neural network is doing. You see how it is, quote, thinking. At the time, we didn't have that.[01:02:00]
So we knew it worked, but we didn't know how. And therefore, people felt, you know, we can't use this because we don't know how this shit works. Sounds like
Andrea Hiott: today, it's back to that. It's just gone accelerated to another level.
Bernardo Kastrup: Well, there is reason to that, because it's not enough for you to know that it works in the instances you've given it to him, to the system.
If you don't know how it works, then you cannot know that the moment you show it something new, that it will still work. Because you don't know how it's doing what it's doing. So we adopted the traditional, you know, Approach based on our physics understanding of what's going on, um, you know, decay physics based on quantum field theory, the standard model.
That's what we went with, but it planted the thought in my head. I couldn't make a computer that was as good as a physicist in telling me whether it's a Higgs boson there or not. What would it take to make it conscious now? And of course, that question is itself based on a physicalist premise, which is [01:03:00] consciousness is something created out of material arrangements.
And I knocked my head against that wall for a couple of years, and I realized that whatever I did, it would only change structure and function, and it would give me no more and no less reason to think that the thing suddenly became conscious. And I, I realized that I was facing that dilemma because I, I made some mistaken assumption at some point and I traced my steps back and I got to the point where, where I, where I understood that the mistaken assumption was that consciousness, consciousness is something that is created out of material arrangements.
Even the theory that that is the case. arises within consciousness. Consciousness is the only given of nature, the only pre theoretical given. Everything that is not in consciousness is an abstraction. It's not an empirical given, like consciousness itself. And when I realized that, and then my physicalism [01:04:00] was off the table, and and then I experienced an ontological vacuum, like my story, in terms of which to relate to reality, was gone.
I needed another one. It's a very uncomfortable space. So,
Andrea Hiott: I'm sorry to stop you, but this is really interesting, because when you say that, it's not like you were reading materialist philosophy, or were you, because you'd said earlier you didn't really think of yourself as a Physicalistic. Was it more that you thought you could build out of materials something like consciousness?
Yeah, so really what you were trying to build was something like intelligence in the way you described it earlier.
Bernardo Kastrup: I had succeeded in building intelligence. Okay, you weren't thinking of it like that or were you?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Bernardo Kastrup: Well, I wanted to know, can I add consciousness to this intelligence that
Andrea Hiott: what was that, what would be that extra thing that you were adding with the consciousness?
Bernardo Kastrup: Well, that's the thing I tried to find for years, and I realized that whatever I hypothesized, it would be only about structure and function, and never about consciousness. Consciousness either is a miracle, or it has to precede all this. [01:05:00] And I'm not much for miracles, so I went with consciousness precedes all this.
And then you need a metaphysics to account for the fact that there obviously is an external world beyond my consciousness, clearly a world that doesn't care whether I like it or not, a world that doesn't care about my morning affirmations or whatever you practice you have to influence the world.
Um, how do we account for that? Well, that you account by understanding that consciousness as an, as an ontological type is not only inside your head. Only under materialism or physicalism is consciousness inside your head. Under idealism, if consciousness is fundamental, then it's your head that is in consciousness.
But you have to account for the fact that your personal consciousness doesn't know what's happening in China right now and can't change the world merely by an act of volition. So that's why I pursued the path of an objective [01:06:00] form of idealism under which there is an external world, but that external world, too, is made of mental states, akin to mine, but they are not mine.
They are out there, just like my thoughts from your point of view. My thoughts are mental states, but they are not in your mind. They are external and objective from your point of view, but they are subjective, essentially, from their own point of view. Same thing for in an external world under idealism. So, I built this new story for myself, but I did engage What was the, what was
Andrea Hiott: the moment of crisis though?
I still don't really understand. , because it wasn't just that you couldn't build a conscious computer, was it? Because you said you had to rethink your whole worldview. So was it, what was the real crisis there?
Bernardo Kastrup: The crisis was that in understanding that physicalism didn't hold any water because I pursued the literature as well And I realized that the literature in physicalism is basically a set of promises It's no matter
Andrea Hiott: how many models you make you're never [01:07:00] gonna
Bernardo Kastrup: know you're not understand consciousness Because consciousness is there to begin with.
Now what you have to find is what are the boundaries of the dissociative processes within consciousness. Because clearly I am one. I can't read your thoughts. Presumably you can't read mine. So I'm dissociated from you. So finding the boundaries of the dissociation is the next challenge. And we have no reason to think that the silicon computer represents those boundaries.
We do have reason to think that metabolism represents those boundaries. So living beings have private dissociated. Conscious points of view of their own computers don't that was the ultimate conclusion, but it took me years to get there engaging with the literature. I read the physicalist literature. I read the literature and subjective idealism Barclay's idealism, which I thought was entirely dissatisfying, unsatisfying, but you like
Andrea Hiott: Schopenhauer, but obviously not Hegel, huh?
Bernardo Kastrup: I think Hegel was a wise man, [01:08:00] but a dysfunctionally arrogant man to the point of making himself impossible to understand, unless you already know in advance what he's trying to say. And then you recognize that, then you recognize what he's trying to say. But if you don't know it in advance, Hegel is not going to help you.
I think, I
Andrea Hiott: mean, we won't go on a tangent about Hegel, but I think he, if you separate them in from the work, which I know we can't do fully, but, um, But I think there's a practice, like when you're reading it, you kind of get this understanding, I think, of, of the kind of thing he's trying to describe. So, for me, there's a kind of a way in which you can get it before you get it reading him.
But I, I know your point, I see your point. And Schopenhauer is, you know, definitely going towards idolism in a very different way that I know you do. Oh, he's
Bernardo Kastrup: a flat out idealist, an objective idealist. Not Bartholomew just like me, I'm also an objective idealist.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. So, but you were already reading Jung, right?
I mean, so we've reached this moment where you, I mean, of course we're a [01:09:00] cartoon, it's a little bit of a cartoon, but you've kind of realized materialism is wrong. And so there must be idealism and it must, you know, and then it's going to, you're going to work it out in your new PhD into analytical idealism.
But I
Bernardo Kastrup: published many books before I. Yeah, and many papers, but I'm
Andrea Hiott: just, I'm just, that's why I said it's a cartoon because of course, like your whole life goes into this, right? But, it's also not true that you were just kind of a materialist because, like, we didn't explain it, but I brought up the I Ching that you found when you were, what, 12 or 14?
Yeah, 14. 14, in the bookshop, and there was a preface by Jung, and I want to know what about that preface caught your attention, because Jung to me feels very much closer to the realizations you were having later, um, I don't know if that's true or not, but. Relative to there must be something that's not material.
Bernardo Kastrup: Oh, Jung is flat out an idealist, but that's something you understand after you read his entire collected [01:10:00] works. Maybe a couple of times. So that, that realization came much later in my life. When I was 14 I just, Read his preface to the itching and um, I didn't know what the itching was. It had a nice cover with lots of these hexagrams It's funny.
I'm
Andrea Hiott: imagining it right with like i'm imagining it green with like gold little sparkles on it or something I have no idea why it's very weird
Bernardo Kastrup: blue with yellow hexagrams, but it was a particular edition There are so many bad. You don't still
Andrea Hiott: have it or do you
Bernardo Kastrup: I do have it.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, wow. That's amazing
Bernardo Kastrup: It's not here.
Here are the books. I actually use. Yeah, I no longer use are stashed somewhere else.
Andrea Hiott: That's wonderful. You still have it though. That's like a continuity through time. That's very cool. Anyway. Okay. So why how did you because I can't imagine it. I mean, I also like young, very young and I don't really know why I did, but I wonder if you remember.
What about it? I remember exactly what,
Bernardo Kastrup: What caught me. Um, I realized that that book was an [01:11:00] oracle, a means to do divination, to predict the future. And, um, and that to me was absolutely ridiculous. That's a
Andrea Hiott: beautiful thing, what you just said. I don't know what you mean at all, though. How did you realize it's an oracle?
Bernardo Kastrup: You, you just flip the pages and I think his
Andrea Hiott: preface or the I Ching?
Bernardo Kastrup: You just open the book. Anywhere you want, and you'll find a hexagram, a description of it, and what it might mean for the current configuration of time, and what it might mean for the future configurations of time. Under the I chain, time has qualities.
It's not a neutral arrow. Each moment in time has a certain quality and favors certain events, and this, and this favor. other events. So it's an oracle. And it was clear to me very quickly just by, you know, flipping the pages, this is a bloody oracle. Um, and I thought that was ridiculous. Oracles are ridiculous, right?
Then I read the [01:12:00] preface and Jung gives a rationalist hypothesis for why we shouldn't just laugh at oracles. It may not be the, what we think it is, you know, it we sort of regard oracles as something flatter and less sophisticated than how Jung understands an oracle to be. But it was, it was a rationalist account based on the notion of synchronicity and what he basically says is that there are two orthogonal organizing principles in nature.
One is causality and okay, that one has nothing to do with oracles, but the other one is synchronicity in which things that are similar in meaning tend to occur together. And I realized that This is an empirical question. This is not logically fallacious. It may be untrue, but it's an empirical question.
It's something that can be tested. And with that, that disclaimer in place, his account is a rationalist account. So here's a guy who just gave me [01:13:00] a, a, a plausible rationalist account of a bloody oracle
Andrea Hiott: , Was it associated with sort of spirituality and woo woo ish kind of?
No, no, no take it true or just no there is
Bernardo Kastrup: nothing What was it about an
Andrea Hiott: oracle that you didn't trust till you read that I guess that just couldn't happen or
Bernardo Kastrup: well the story that Time has qualities that different moments in time favor different things. It was something I couldn't You It takes seriously until I read the preface, and I don't know why I decided to read the preface, because very quickly, just by flipping the pages, I thought, what the hell is this?
And then there was this preface, and I thought, my God, it's possible to give a rationalist account, which may be untrue, but it is a rational, it's not illogical, it's a rational account of a hypothesis that may give some substance to it. And by the way, it can be empirically verified. So that sort of made me realize that Jung was a source [01:14:00] of insights that opened doors in my mind.
Andrea Hiott: Hmm. It sounds like what you, you've done, what you just described, what you've attempted to do. Maybe I heard you say it, or maybe I'm projecting or something else, but what you just described was he kind of laid out a way that people, you in this situation, could logically Mm hmm. Coherently, with robustness, understand something that had seemed like it needed to just be dismissed.
Right? Exactly. Which is kind of what you do with analytic idealism.
Lay out the idea that the whole world can be mined Which is something a lot of people have dismissed and you do it very rigorously with all yeah,
Bernardo Kastrup: yes it Made me understand that We have to look for our hidden unexamined assumptions Every time [01:15:00] we dismiss something on on a logical basis If we dismiss something purely because it seems illogical You You immediately have to subject that conclusion to criticism by hunting for all the assumptions you are unknowingly making and which base that conclusion.
So that's what Jung taught me very early, that we have to try to examine our hidden assumptions. Assumptions that we don't even know we're making.
Andrea Hiott: That's so powerful in the context of everything we've been talking about, right? Because taking This nihilistic or materialist worldview, seriously, that has become not a means to understand the world like a model of the world, but rather the state of the world, I think, kind of comes out of what you were talking about the fear of death and the fear of all these things that we're not supposed to explore, not only death, but also that what we were talking about before, too, that there might be so much we don't [01:16:00] see and understand around us because we can't handle it yet, you know, so to speak.
Bernardo Kastrup: We live in our own fictions. We mistake our fictions for reality, certainly in physicalism, but in everything else as well. And hunting for unexamined assumptions is very difficult because they are precisely the things that you tend to not look at, that you tend to take for granted. You don't even know you're making those assumptions.
Physicalism is riddled. with unexamined assumptions. And it's not only a psychological dynamic that physicalism became mainstream. It's changing now. It's not going to be mainstream for much longer. I don't think even in my lifetime it will remain mainstream because something that is illogical and empirically untenable just Cannot survive for very long.
It's just that our lives are very short But it doesn't survive many centuries Um, there are other reasons why physicalism became mainstream and look what i'm about to say is not a conspiracy theory [01:17:00] I'm, not saying there is a cabal that knowingly enforces the fallacy of physicalism No, but it was a game of social dominance Also that propelled physicalism forward because since the 17th century Um, um, the, the, the elites that eventually became the bourgeoisie towards the end of the 18th century, they vied for social dominance against the clergy, the church, which had been the dominant social group for a thousand years before, well, more than a thousand years all the way deep into scholasticism.
And then this new sort of, uh, scholarly commercial class that became the bourgeoisie in the beginning of the industrial revolution, they started vying for dominance against the church. And in the beginning, the church was more powerful. They burned Bruno at the stake. They could kill one another. Um, um, but around the.
time of the [01:18:00] July Revolution in 1830 or so, um, the, the, what was now really the bourgeoisie was in a position of advantage against the church. And how do you apply the coup de grâce? How do you win the war? Is by Pulling the carpet from pulling the rug from under the church, from under the feet of the clergy.
And the way to do that is to say what the church busies itself with, which is psyche, a Greek word that means mind, but also means spirit, uh uh or something religious metaphysically distinct from the physical by that point Theseus and Psyche were already in the early 19th century, they were equivalent. Goethe is on record saying that you got to be an idiot to not recognize that everything in nature must have a physical side and a mental side.
Psyche and Theseus side. So they were [01:19:00] already equivalent. So the bourgeoisie were no longer losing, but they wanted to win. And how do you win? By saying psyche derives from thesis. So psyche is secondary. Matter is primary. So what the church busies itself with, mind, spirit, that's secondary. They're abusing themselves with derivative stuff.
And we, the scientific scholarly azi embodied by people like Darvin. Even Ter himself was a bourgeois vra. He was the son of a financially independent lawyer, and he was in Nobo by, um, by the Duke of Weimar, but he was not an aristocrat by birth. Um, they by by. Pushing by by peddling this notion that psyche was secondary and matter was primary.
They completely won the war over social and cultural dominance over the clergy And [01:20:00] by before the 19th century was over that the dominance was clear. It was very clear to Nietzsche who chronicled that That period while living through it and famously proclaimed that God is dead and the basis for all of our morals would have to be revised and people would have to find a new meaning in life not based in transcendence anymore because God is dead is the
Andrea Hiott: famous quote.
Yes.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I mean, this is, I'm, I'm putting it probably through a Hegelian lens now that I've brought up Hegel, but it sounds very Hegelian to me in a way, or, or I'm trying to , rationalize it or understand it because it sounds, you know, you could think of that and it's been told in a lot of historical tales of the church just had too much power because all the mystery, all the death, all the kind of wonder was in control of, the church and most people couldn't read and so they just had a monopoly on that part of the world which in a way gave people a way to still partake in that part of the world because they could just be told [01:21:00] what it was and how to do it.
But then you, so then you know you need almost, not need, but I can understand like that, that then scientists, people who are looking into matter or building machines to try to better understand things would almost need to take that power away in a sense, because what they're really looking at is that stuff, even if they don't say that's what they're looking
Bernardo Kastrup: at.
This is usually how it happens in history. You know, if you're a student of history, you see this happening again and again, the movement starts Um, based on a very noble cause, the church is reserving for itself a power it doesn't deserve, doesn't, it intrinsically shouldn't have, because the priesthood made themselves necessary intermediaries between the people and the answers to the, to the great questions.
The people couldn't have a direct relationship with divinity. So they, they sort of grabbed that power and a movement, a [01:22:00] resistance movement against it started, which is noble. We should applaud it. But as it so often happens in history, the people who won from the church, instead of giving that power to the people, kept that power for themselves.
And psychologically, that has to do with fluid compensation, you know, seeing yourself as distinct from the masses sort of gives you meaning and validation. And that's what the scientific elites did. And today it's still going on. It's not science that has changed. Usurp that power. It's scientism. Mm-Hmm.
SSM is not practiced by scientists who are sl away in the laboratory every day to find cures for diseases and make sense of foundations of physics. No, these are not scientists in the sense of sm they are scientists in the sense of practicing science science people, um, scientists mis promoted by the priesthood of so-called.
Science spokespeople think of Richard [01:23:00] Dawkins, Brian Cox, um, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Many of these people are not really doing science. Some of them have never done science, cannot say that about Richard. Um, but, um, they promote a philosophy, a metaphysics. That is loosely based on science as a methodology, but which goes way beyond the reach that the scientific method allows you to go in making assertions about reality.
And they also tell you what it's all about. And if my previous interviewer, Alex from Skeptico, if he's correct, um, Yuval Harari is, is, Falling for that. He's doing the same thing. He's telling you there is no meaning. All I can give you is video games and drugs Okay, they are the new priests, you know, it's a The winning party usurps that power for themselves.
That's not science. That's scientism. It's metaphysics
Andrea Hiott: I agree, and do you think it [01:24:00] comes almost, well, I mean, I brought up Alex before because we talked on Philosophy Babel, which I think you, you know that show, but, and he just wrote this article about it, kind of what you're talking about, I don't know if you've seen it, about the Ponzi scheme of science or something.
Bernardo Kastrup: Oh, I saw it come by. I haven't read it. Yeah, because this is a discussion that's been going on for a long time.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, well, I won't, I won't go, go into that, but I guess what, what I was going to say is sometimes you start as a scientist, as I'm, I'm thinking to try to put myself in the position of Noiri, for example, people start coming to you and they need the answer all the time.
And you've the way you've gotten the answer is this materialist way , and it almost becomes that you have to defend it if you're not able to hold the paradox in the way we've been trying to do, , then you almost start defending it to the point where you almost put yourself in a corner to where you can't possibly say, Oh, actually, all this other stuff does matter.
After all, do you know what I mean? There's some weird [01:25:00] inertia that people get stuffed into these places.
Bernardo Kastrup: There are more hidden discussions than the public gets to see. But, the, the science, the representatives of the Church of Ss, which is a metaphysics, the metaphysics of physicalism, it's only very loosely coupled to science.
These guys, they are not, they are as much. The deceived as the deceiver. In other words, they are being honest. It's not like they, they know something else is true, but they keep peddling something they know isn't true. No, they believe the shit they are regurgitating every day in the airwaves. Truly believe that.
And at some point, their very sense of identity becomes sort of enmeshed with that, and then you can't pull back anymore. Psychologically, it becomes impossible to pull back. Even when you are in a private discussion in which there are several participants, [01:26:00] and there is a consensus emerging, and the data seems to be very clear and unambiguous, and you're backed into a corner, and if you were really an objective thinker, you would say, Well, Okay, I have to admit that the weight of the discussion now seems to be shifting to something else.
No, no, no. They double down. They triple down. They quadruple down. They will die saying that. Um, it's just human psychology. It has nothing to do with reason and evidence. It's just psychology. It's emotion.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and it's hard stuff. I mean, the ego, , once, I, I, once you get, you make your way, your name, through something, you do start feeling like you have to defend it, and it takes a really big person to be able to see that in themselves, and admit it, and recognize it.
I mean, some of the best philosophers and scientists do this, but it's, I think, Can be really hard, but so we've kind of set up, we know what's wrong with materialism. What is idealism? You're the world that you've opened, which is I won't say [01:27:00] it's the polarity of this, but it's, it's showing this is not the only way we have to go.
What is it giving us? Or even what does it give you? Or what did it give you back then in that moment? When you started this shift,
Bernardo Kastrup: well, I didn't become an idealist because it gave me something in the sense that it made me feel better I didn't I'm too committed to truth for that. I think Physicalism is bleak.
But if reason and evidence points to it, then we should bite that bullet The world is bleak and that's all there is to it. No, I came to I didn't really mean it
Andrea Hiott: gave it to you Like made you feel good. I don't think gifts always make us feel good, but I see what you're saying
Bernardo Kastrup: It didn't make me feel good at all, on the contrary, I still have a hard time reconciling myself with the implications of idealism.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I don't think what you're doing is easy, you know, coming up with this, defending this saying.
Bernardo Kastrup: People think idealism is great, it makes life so much more positive. That's not how I experience it, it makes life meaningful, but it's a tough pill to swallow if you [01:28:00] really understand the implications. Um, idealism was The one narrative that survived my own criticism regarding the empirical evidence we have, like, obviously, there is an external world that doesn't depend on me.
And more detailed empirical evidence from foundations of physics, neuroscience of consciousness, and a rational derivation line. Which physicalism doesn't have. Physicalism has some jumps in which you're basically appealing to miracles, or to unknowns, or to magic, like, emergentism in physicalism.
Like, ten euros are not conscious, a hundred are not, a thousand are not. But there is some point in which you, you add one euro and boom! There is enough complexity and now it's all conscious. That's an appeal to magic. It's giving a label to an unknown. waving a flag saying emergentism, which has no semantic ground.
In other words, it means nothing. You're just talking through your eyes. If you forgive me, my, my, my, [01:29:00] my imagery. And people are not doing that. Because they want to deceive. They, they drink their own snake oil. Well, you
Andrea Hiott: make a really good, they make a really good argument. And the argument itself, to them, feels like it's justified it.
So, it's not, because the argument seems good, right? From that logical point of view, that Aristotelian kind of logical sense. Then you can feel good about it. So, it doesn't matter that it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, they
Bernardo Kastrup: start from the conclusion. And if there is an argument line that leads to that conclusion, it doesn't matter how many miracles there are entailed in that thought line.
It must be true because it leads to the conclusion that we know, right? Should be true. Right. So you're in this weird circle of
Andrea Hiott: proving what you stated or something.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. Circular reasoning. Right. Idealism gave me a derivation line that requires no miraculous steps. And that suddenly soothed my, [01:30:00] my eagerness for, for some narrative that made sense, some model that made sense, that may ultimately proven to be wrong, but based on everything we know now and based on the most objective, And sincere reasoning we can deploy does survive and does seem to account for the data.
That's what it gave me.
Andrea Hiott: Do you think, um, I mean, because I guess, I don't know if you want to say it better than me, but we could summarize analytic idealism, that everything is mental or then.
Yeah, how would you, you will do better than me, but
Bernardo Kastrup: yeah, everything is mental. In other words, everything's experiential, but not everything is your personal experience. The entirety of nature is constituted of experiential states. But not your experiential states alone. There is a world out there, beyond you and me, a world that we inhabit, [01:31:00] a world that will still be there after we are no longer around, as these pockets of dissociated mental states that we are while we are living beings.
But that world that would survive us, that will survive us, is also constituted of mental states. The mental states that constitute the world appear to us as we colloquially refer to as Matter. Physical stuff. In other words, the contents of perception. Under idealism, under analytic idealism, um, which is my formulation of it perception is like an airplane's dashboard.
Imagine that you're flying an airplane that has no windows. All you have are the dials on the dashboard. You can still fly safely. It's flying by instruments. Pilots are qualified to do that every day. The dashboard gives you accurate information about the world. But it isn't the world. It's a representation of the world that doesn't even look like the world.
Dashboard indications don't look like the storm outside, the [01:32:00] lightning, the shape of the horizon, the shapes of the clouds. Um, but you can fly safely through the dashboard alone. So under analytic idealism, what we call the physical world, the contents of perception, are dashboard indications.
Physicality is not the world as it is in itself. It's a representation thereof, a representation that we, dissociated complexes of the mind of nature, create ourselves, and which are then modulated by the real external states of the world, which are experiential states. So the world is not physical.
Physicality is our cognitive representation of the world. And we cannot access the real states of the world directly because we are dissociated from it. That's what life is. Life, biology, metabolism, is what a dissociative process in this one field of subjectivity that nature is looks like when represented on a dashboard.
A brain is part of what our True experiential inner [01:33:00] states look like when they are represented on a dashboard that's
Andrea Hiott: so mind consciousness Experience. Can we say these are interchangeable in a sense as the primitive?
Bernardo Kastrup: It's depend depends on how you were What I'm
Andrea Hiott: getting at is we were talking about modeling and we were talking about, you know Do you think of language as a model?
Do you think that there's other ways to perhaps say what you're expressing, um, without necessarily these same terms? Or do you, are you seeing these kind of terms like mind consciousness as kind of, like, , how do you deal with that? Yeah, the possibility that language is already a model and so are you are you giving us a kind of way to get there that is only one way or is it the way
Bernardo Kastrup: a conceptual model uses language and it certainly does that when it needs to be communicated it may even use language as we are formulating it within ourselves, but there are multiple [01:34:00] ways of talking about a model in language, multiple linguistic avenues for trying to express a model.
Um, some of them are metaphorical, some of them are allegorical, some of them are literal, some of them are mythopoetic. Um, so no, I, I don't elevate language to the level of an ultimate truth. I think it's an operational convenience, it's just one we fall for a lot of times. We mistake language for the thing we are trying to express.
So I think analytic idealism, there are many ways in which it can be formulated. I propose a few, but I'm sure others can propose other ways to expand on the exact same model.
Andrea Hiott: So Jung, for example, wasn't talking about Analytic idealism and these kinds of terms and as you show in your book, he's using very different terms I mean, we didn't get into how something can be unconscious, but this is like really interesting to me but , there's all kinds of ways we can turn this around and In a way Jung is expressing it in a different [01:35:00] way.
Like you kind of show that in the book So I guess what I'm trying to open up is that sometimes it feels like we have to choose between all these isms You know rather than like we were talking about before these isms are ways of trying to talk about or model or express what can't necessarily ever be completely 100 percent modeled or expressed.
And I just wonder if that feels comfortable to you, if, if you think of it like that, or, because you could easily get stuck in a corner too, where you have to defend, you know, these particulars, but even though you're pointing past the particulars.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, no, I'm comfortable switching language. If if, if I find myself in a place where I'm not Getting my ideas across properly, I'm very comfortable with switching the language.
I mean, different books of mine talk about the same thing in completely different ways. So I, I, I, I've. Yeah, I use a lot of metaphors,
Andrea Hiott: I guess, sometimes. I've used
Bernardo Kastrup: metaphors in some books, in others, like, The Idea of the World, or my latest, which is coming out in October, called Analytical Idealism in a Nutshell.
I try to be [01:36:00] as direct as possible with As little symbolic content as possible. So now I'm very flexible about this. What I want people to get is what I mean behind what I say.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And
Bernardo Kastrup: the way to do that is to say what I mean in as many different ways as I possibly can so people can distill what is common behind all of those different linguistic approaches.
Andrea Hiott: And that's hard too, because you get called to task by all the people who want to latch onto one thing or the other, but maybe that's interesting too, but, because you do, even your books, sometimes you're talking to the people who have the knowledge of reference or conceptual knowledge relative to a certain form of academia where you write papers in a certain way.
There's a couple of your books that are like, basically like papers, and then other ones which are speaking more the way Jung speaks. Did um, and that's kind of holding the paradox. Yeah, it's not they're not dichotomies. I guess like for me That's a service you're giving to show Because I talk about holding the paradox a lot of like being able to open [01:37:00] the space and not Not smush the things together or dissolve them Necessarily, but they don't need to be the you know, you're there are two different ways of describing the process
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, I think you know, I I deliberately try to avoid neologisms as much as possible, creating new words.
And unfortunately, this is very common in philosophy and science as well. And then you get sort of stuck with that word creation of yours. I deliberately avoid that. And what I try to do instead is to say the same thing is as in as many different ways as possible, because I want people to see past what I'm saying and discern what I mean.
That's my way of dealing with this difficulty. But at the end of the day, Andrea, people bring themselves to bear when they absorb a message and whatever baggage they have with them, they will bring it to bear in their understanding of the message. This is unavoidable. It's unavoidable to me when I am on the receiving end.
It's part of our respective journeys. I just [01:38:00] do the best I can. But beyond that, you know, we are all responsible.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, well, that's exactly what I was sort of getting at because the way I think of all of this, whatever we're doing, this encountering, living, philosophizing, is we are trying to find a way to understand that perspectivalism of each of us are kind of on a journey, as you said.
There's a certain path and no matter how shared the landscape is, We've seen different things on the path and we're going to understand whatever this process is and that we're trying to understand, we're probably both going to understand it a little different way. And, and that's okay. I mean, even though we're sharing similar regularities, but I guess that gets to, do you still, do you think of things in linear, like beginning and end, or do you see all this as nested in a way, or, or.
Like how do you think of the kind of all of this because the dissociation for example can sound like still like we're putting two things against each other, but I feel like it's more they're connected and they're nested and like I was describing at the [01:39:00] beginning about consciousness, we nest out of ourselves into medical consciousness.
And to me, that can also be kind of this. So, yeah. How do you see that linear. Look,
Bernardo Kastrup: even in psychiatry, dissociation is not considered a fundamental split. You can have a dissociated patient that gets cured. His dissociation is resolved and he realizes that all of his dissociated complexes were actually him or her. Um, this happens in psychiatry all the time. Dissociative identity disorder is a very common condition.
Different degrees, but very common. You talk to any practicing psychiatrist, and he will tell you it happens a couple of times a week, um, in their practice. So, no, dissociation does not mean a fundamental separation. It's, it's a cognitive thing. It's an appearance. It's a form of illusion. Um, I think, um, Nature is one field of [01:40:00] subjectivity.
If we eventually get to a unified field theory in which we Collapse the 17 quantum fields plus something standing for gravity into one field. I would interpret that as that one field is this field of subjectivity. And the variety and the diversity of the states of nature are just different patterns of excitation of this one field.
So even dissociation is a configuration, a local configuration, taken on by a segment of this one field. It's never a fundamental separation between us and this one field that nature is.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I mean I have to bring up love because it's love and philosophy and I guess I'm trying to kind of get towards that in a way that's not sentimental because, or that is sentimental in the right, in the way that's authentic, because if we can think of it as nested and get away from this beginning and end kind of thing, and we can even bring up this idea of consciousness and in the way we were talking about at the beginning, and that Um, [01:41:00] what you were saying about it's crazy that we think we're all separate, or you said it in a different way, but it is all, it's, it's all, when we say it's all one, sometimes it sounds like it has a beginning and an end, but it's all some kind of ongoing process that we're trying to understand, and it seems to me that in a way, these dissociations with you being one of them, and me being another, and all the other people, my dog here, and there's all these beings which could be thought of as trying to somehow Not even trying, but part of this process of dissociation, in the way that you mean it, and I don't mean it in an unhealthy way, though I think it can become unhealthy, right?
I mean, there's a point where it could, but
Bernardo Kastrup: Anything can become unhealthy, it's a matter of degree. Look, I, if my experience, because I live analytic idealism now, it's not just something I talk about, I have been living it for years now. Um, my life is informed by it, it's my reality. It's the best narrative I have and I live accordingly.
So I, I, I live it. I embody my own philosophy. I'm not just writing papers. Um, I don't have [01:42:00] to defend any academic position. So I am not forced. What
Andrea Hiott: does that do in your life? That's a really strong thing. I want to understand it.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yes. So I can tell you what it does to me. It doesn't make me want to hold hands with everybody and sing the kumbaya.
No. If I were in Ukraine, I would, I would have taken up arms right now. If somebody threatens my girlfriend, there will be a response, which is not holding hands, singing a kumbaya.
So that did not change. What it did to me is it's heightened my sense of empathy to a point that is sometimes difficult to bear.
Um, it's the recognition that the subjectivity behind the eyes of someone else is the same subjectivity that is behind your eyes. It's that recognition. So it becomes very easy to use a colloquial expression to slide [01:43:00] into somebody else's shoes. If you allow yourself to do it, and sometimes you're pulled into it, like when major events happen, like October 7th in Israel, or like the bombardment of Gaza, or, or the, the war in Ukraine you sort of, I feel dragged into somebody else's shoes, and it can become dysfunctional.
So it's, um, because I never had this before, I, I didn't evolve coping mechanisms. For dealing with empathy. It's not something that afflicted me in my earlier years. So I'm having to evolve that very quickly now as an adult to be able to deal with it. Um, another thing it does for me is, um, The greatest fear of mankind is back because now I know that, um, the subjectivity behind my eyes will experience my death and what happens afterwards.
Bernardo Gastrop, this particular narrative self, this particular dissociated complex, will dissolve. Um, but the subjectivity [01:44:00] behind the storyteller that convinces itself it is Bernardo Gastrop, that subjectivity stays. So death is a um, Fathomable. Transitioning my state of consciousness. Because look, psychedelics only reduce brain activity.
And not even by a major amount. It's very measurable, it's significant, but not major. And you can go through ego dissolution and you can have terrible experiences. Just by a reduction of brain metabolism. Imagine when brain metabolism ceases. That fear is back in my life. That fear of how is it going to be?
How is it going to feel? What will be that state? And luckily I have had enough psychedelic experiences. I live in the Netherlands so I could do that responsibly as an adult a few years ago. I have had enough experiences to know that after the pain of ego dissolution there is a space of profound [01:45:00] peace.
Untouched peace. Um, so I hope that's where it's going to go, but I cannot know because my brain metabolism never stopped completely. It only ever got reduced by psychedelic use. So that is back. Um, another thing that has happened to me a lot is, um, the crisis of meaning has disappeared from my life. And now I am like fish in the water.
I don't talk about meaning, like fish don't talk about water. I mean, I talk about it because I have to communicate to other people, but I don't talk to myself about meaning. Questions about meaning don't arise in my mind anymore. It's, I'm surrounded by it every second of my existence. Every breath I take is sort of, It's percolated with meaning, it's saturated, um, with it nature is looking at itself through my eyes and that's the meaning of my existence, whatever happens, and it's always there.
So that's great. And now I am not touched by depression, by ennui you know, [01:46:00] existential despair. Do you feel closer
Andrea Hiott: to nature or to people that you're with? Has it changed your relationships with nature and with other humans, your girlfriend, or the people around you?
Bernardo Kastrup: I am, um, more appreciative of differences between people.
I'm a lot I'm a lot less judgmental of people. Not entirely judgment free. I judge Putin. You bet. I judge him through and through. Um, but I don't, I no longer have any impetus or energy to judge people gratuitously. Like judge, pass judgment on my neighbors, or pass judgment on people who think differently or act differently, pass judgment in regarding how they dress, what car they drive, how loud they speak, what topics of conversation they choose.
I don't have any energy in me to pass judgment about that. I just experience it. The diversity of this subjectivity is something to be experienced and, and registered. [01:47:00] That's all I do. I don't have energy for judgment, um, anymore.
Andrea Hiott: Is that because you've been able to surrender to something like or is it because of clarity or what would you say is it?
You know people
Bernardo Kastrup: in spiritual circles people talk about surrender a lot as if it were something you could do
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I don't know why that word came up, but I, I guess it felt like when you were talking that you, it's not that you gave up 'cause that's the not, and it's not that you won't, didn't come up anymore.
It's like you see clearly, but there's a kind of flow or something, you know?
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah. To, to say, to see clearly it is already a kind of judgment. Um, so you're just present? Yeah. Like great to, I mean, I pass judgment if I have to. If, and I, if I am in a position. To do so, like I have direct reports, so I have to judge their performance.
I'm in a position to do that. I have to. So I do that objectively as much as I can. [01:48:00] But I will not pass judgment on an acquaintance that came to my place and behaved in a certain way or dressed in a certain way or drunk too much. It's like that. You don't need to judge.
Andrea Hiott: Somebody to know who you are, right?
So it's yeah,
Bernardo Kastrup: if I'm not in a position to have to judge the energy of judgment It doesn't arise. I don't know It's not like I surrendered. It's not like I gave up. It was not a choice. I made it doesn't happen It just doesn't happen anymore I I don't bother it's like I feel like yawning, it's like, why am I going to bother to do this?
It's
Andrea Hiott: like a waste of energy. It's
Bernardo Kastrup: a waste of energy, it's like I feel no need or interest. Which is
Andrea Hiott: true. That's why I say it's all clearly, because sometimes judging isn't, I mean, there's a difference between just, this is the way you see things and you state it, versus like it needing to be referenced back to some egoic kind of thing that, you know, all that.
I don't know whether
Bernardo Kastrup: it's more or less clear how it is, how it has become for me. I used [01:49:00] to judge people. The most difficult thing to deal with for me, at least since the war in Ukraine begun, is heightened empathy. That's very difficult. It's a very present thing that I struggled with daily. I'm becoming better at it.
I'm finding rooms in the palace of my mind where I can sort of put those things there and close the door for a little while. I visit those rooms because if I don't visit them, I lose my humanity. So I cannot do that. I cannot abstract from away from human suffering. But I, I can't, I found a place for it.
I'm finding a place for it. And this is evolving in me. Before that, the most difficult thing to deal with was this The fear of the major change in the state of consciousness that is coming for all of us called the death. That is not a fear I had before. Now when you're dead, you're dead. You're not going to be there.
You didn't have it before. No, I didn't have it before. No.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I , maybe I shouldn't bring it up, but I just remember [01:50:00] that you had a really hard problem a really hard experience with it when you were really young, right? When you were reading the Jung and the I Ching, because you were really close to your dad, right?
And he passed away. So for me, it's, I'm wondering, did, am I just connecting that through some wrong way or, because that age, I remember being that age and I remember things that happened to me at that age and it's philosophical or I don't know, it's, yeah, or is it just too much to try to connect those things?
I mean, I have,
Bernardo Kastrup: I probably have answered this question both in the positive and in the negative in the past. So, I don't know. You don't even have to, I, I can also just
Andrea Hiott: edit it all out. I just, it's connected for me, you know. To try to understand it relative to why all this matters. Yeah. Because, yeah.
Bernardo Kastrup: I can tell you this.
Before my father, my father died, I already had metaphysical questions popping in my head. It seems that as long as I can remember, I have always, I never got a [01:51:00] religious education. My mother is a Catholic, but she never sent me to Sunday school, never forced me to attend mass, meaning I didn't, you know, that stuff.
I hated church when I was a kid. I saw her pray a couple of times and I thought, that's curious. I didn't dismiss it. I just thought curious, curious behavior that humanity is capable of this. That was my thought as a kid. We're very neutral and impartial as kids something that the adults in us should learn.
Yeah, that's kind of what I meant
Andrea Hiott: by surrender, by the way, that neutrality, that's the right word. But anyway,
Bernardo Kastrup: my father's death didn't create metaphysical questions in my mind because I already had them. You see what I mean? Um, the main thing it did, it forced me to contemplate my own life. What do I do now?
What is this about now? How do I survive this? Where do I have to go? What do I have to do? You know, that, that was the main, um, struggle [01:52:00] for me. And probably it heightened the metaphysical questions because you always wonder, is my father, does my father still exist somewhere?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And what, where did he go?
And on your own death, I was wondering, because I'll just be really honest with you. I was around the same age, the first time a family member died and I wrote, it was the first time I ever wrote anything. And I kind of wrote this little kind of poem about like, how do we, how does something hurt you so much when you can't?
Um, see it or reach out and touch it or something. It was some kind of rhymey thing. And I don't know, for me, those same questions have structured my bigger questions in a way, when I look back, um, and I'm sure you could, I could link it to a million other things, not just that, but, um, this fear of death thing has comes up a lot, and it's In all of us and in all these things we've been talking about it's kind of sitting there in a way Making us wonder what's the meaning of life or what are we doing?
And how do we deal with this fear? And so yeah, I don't know for me. It's still something hard to get a [01:53:00] grip on What
Bernardo Kastrup: I notice from talking to people is that people tend to associate their fear of death with the fear of oblivion Like they're going to cease to exist and that leads to a cognitive dissonance Why because deep inside they know that's not And we all know in the intuitive roots of our being, because you're connected with reality, right?
We didn't parachute here, we arose out of reality, so we are part of reality. In those intuitive roots that connect, connect us to reality, and they're very low down, they're not here in the canopy of airy thoughts. There we know we don't cease to exist. And therefore, because culturally we believe we do, It leads to a cognitive dissonance between what we feel deep inside and what we believe rationally.
And that cognitive dissonance, I think, is partly what accounts for this, this recoil that people have about death. Like, it's a kind of, I'm [01:54:00] gonna die. No, no, this cannot be. Because if I die, the world dies. The world ends. And of course, that's true. If you were to really cease to exist as subjectivity, then everything would cease to exist, meaning it's not going to be like that.
And, and, But the fear of annihilation, that I don't have. So I, I am not, I don't struggle with trying to make my life count because I'm going to be annihilated at the end of it. No, that I don't have. I don't have. So it's not
Andrea Hiott: like this where you need to live forever, be
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: the reason I bring it the reason I'm what I'm connecting it to is when you I said surrender But it's this kind of neutrality and I was asking you like what does idealism do for you?
And I mean it even in a wider sense for kind of helping or count I don't know what words to use this materialist kind of track we've been on it seems like this offers a way to relax back into [01:55:00] or it's not it's not comfortable, but some kind of neutrality relative to these You Questions. Um, in a way that helps.
I mean, you don't need to fear death, right? But then you said you still are afraid of death. So, of
Bernardo Kastrup: course, it's a major transition in my state of consciousness and I don't know how to go into fuel. You bet. I fear it. It's a
Andrea Hiott: fear like going on a rollercoaster kind of fear or, well, that's more
Bernardo Kastrup: predictable.
It's more predictable than this. I mean, we have these people who have these near death experiences, right? I think even if you discard the majority of it, you are left with a set that is impossible to dismiss. By and large, they seem to be positive, but not unanimously so. There are people who have a negative NDEs, and of course they tell it already dressed conceptual dictionary of their own culture.
So if they saw a reassuring presence, the Indian would say it's Krishna. The Christian would say it was [01:56:00] Jesus. So you have to pierce through all of that symbolism that becomes, um, that they dress the story with based on their own cultural dictionary, because that's all they have to communicate, whatever they can communicate.
But underneath all that, I don't think there is unanimity that it's good. So, um, It seems that it can go either way. So you better have anxiety about an unknown that I know is coming. So you think you might
Andrea Hiott: suffer or something? I guess, I'm just, because for me, I fear other people's deaths. Or, I don't worry about my death, or I don't have a sense of fear about that.
I used to, but like when people are troubled in my life and I know, you know, there's, it really worries me. And the way that you were talking about the empathy with, like, I can't, if I watch the news too much, I won't be able to function really well right now because it's just, you know, so those kinds of things, I still feel, even knowing [01:57:00] The world is consciousness in a way and even feeling like people who have died is still feeling present with them and being able to Kind of understand what that is in a way.
That's not that's kind of neutral. That's peaceful for me But thinking of other people hurting and stuff still is very hard.
Bernardo Kastrup: I don't know For me to other people hurting. Yes other people going through the transition We call that the transition state of consciousness No, that's because it It's nature right one could argue suffering is part of nature as well But my my my empathy makes it bothersome for me to deal with it
Andrea Hiott: Wow, that's interesting.
So it really is that subjective personal to only you kind of Mystery, right that you don't know what in the world. It's gonna be Yeah,
Bernardo Kastrup: there is a famous poem and a rage rage against the dying of the light. No that I don't I don't have any because that that's raging against the prospect of annihilation and I I You There is nothing in me that [01:58:00] believes in annihilation anymore.
Even if I try to, you know, I can't. I can't anymore, you know. But is
Andrea Hiott: some of that just because you've done so much and accomplished so much? And did you already feel that?
Bernardo Kastrup: It's what analytic idealism informs me of, and I really gave it. A 20 year long thought, you know, it's not a conclusion. I arrived at lightly, and I dug into every discipline that is even remotely relevant to this.
I educated myself in multiple fields. Um, so I can't do more homework than that to arrive at an informed conclusion. Maybe that's
Andrea Hiott: what's so neutral or, or that whatever we're trying to describe that you feel now, that seems to me almost like a time, the time spent with it. And all of that, I mean, you know, that comes,
Bernardo Kastrup: look, what I could tell you is I am in perfect peace with the fact that Bernardo Castro will die.
Andrea Hiott: But
Bernardo Kastrup: I am anxious about how that will feel [01:59:00] like.
Andrea Hiott: Because you don't control it. You can't understand it or control it. No, no,
Bernardo Kastrup: no. You
Andrea Hiott: know,
Bernardo Kastrup: the best model we have, the best safe model we have, phenomenological model, of, of the end of metabolism is the reduction of brain metabolism caused by psychedelics. And those experiences can be wonderful, but they can be very, very dangerous.
Difficult too, and we do not have a clear understanding of the causative factors, the, the, the, the endogenous psychic causative factors that Lead it make it go one way or the other so because we don't have that understanding I don't have that understanding so I don't know how it will go. So Look, I don't think i'm going to be annihilated Um, you may say it's presumptuous of you to say you are sure, but I am as sure as a human being can be that I'm not going to be annihilated.
And if others are in doubt, it's their journey. You know, it's their own. I have my own journey. My reality is I'm not going to be annihilated. So I'm not raging against the dying of the light [02:00:00] because it's not going to die, but it can become an ugly light and I don't know how it's going to be. So I'm anxious about, about it in the sense that, um, that you would be anxious.
Going to a foreign land without knowing what to expect, without having any idea what's going to happen. That, that kind of anxiety, you know, you're going to experience it. You just don't know how it's going to be, but there are other things that oppress the lives of most humans today, especially in the affluent West, which, which have to do with the lack of meaning, the meaning crisis, you know, depression, nihilism, that is gone.
I didn't even notice it disappearing from my life. One day I looked back and oh my god, it's not there anymore.
Andrea Hiott: That makes so much sense to me because you've re It's like you've let yourself be what you are, connected. And, you know, once we can do that, and I don't mean it in I mean it in a really, really It's not easy.[02:01:00]
And it's not like you just do it and then it's It's such a different way of being in the world, that it's, you can't even really explain it, you know.
Bernardo Kastrup: There, well, I, I tried to do that in a book that will come out next year. Yeah, you, you tried to explain it in
Andrea Hiott: many ways, but.
Bernardo Kastrup: I shouldn't be talking about it yet, according to my publisher, but my 2025.
Yeah, I tried to, I wanted
Andrea Hiott: to read it. For some reason, I thought it was going to be out earlier, but it, yeah, it's coming out very soon.
Bernardo Kastrup: There is a book coming out now, which is a summary of analytic idealism. It's analytic idealism in a nutshell. In a nutshell, right? It's a short book, straight to the point.
Yeah end of October. Oh, okay. Straight to the point. No bullshit, no, no divagations, no, just that. What Analytica Idealism is. With a little
Andrea Hiott: brain and a nutshell on the cover.
Bernardo Kastrup: But there is a book that will come out next year. It's in production already. It's called The Diamond and the Soul of the West.
Oh, wow. That's amazing. So I'm going to say some things now that I discuss at length in that book. Um, the, one of the biggest changes for me [02:02:00] was the acceptance of the impersonal in me. Because you see, as an analytical idealist, I, I understand that I am a dissociated process in the mind of nature, which is one mind.
So it's fundamentally an impersonal mind that creates. Because, you know, everything that can happen in nature eventually does. So life did happen in nature. What is life? Well, it's a dissociation that arises in the mind of nature. It could arise, so eventually it does. Because that's how nature works. You wait long enough, everything that can happen will happen.
So that's what I am. What that means is that the personal in me is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, The product of the beginning of that dissociative process, but the medium on which it happens is the same medium that was there in the beginning of all things. If such a thing ever happened, um, it's completely impersonal.
It's the sum total of [02:03:00] existence. So I, I intellectually now accept the existence and even the preponderance of the impersonal in me. of those mental processes that arise within me that are not Bernardo Kastrop's. They are the stream, the flow of the totality of nature as it expresses itself through me.
Therefore, I will have Using Schopenhauer's word, I will have the will to certain things that have nothing to do with Bernardo Kastrup's personal agenda. And we all experience that. We say, well, I really need to do this, but I don't know why. I just know that I must pursue this path. Now, that's the impersonal in you.
I as an analytical, as an analytical idealist, I now give myself intellectual permission to acknowledge the existence of this impersonal flow as it flows through me and expresses [02:04:00] itself through me. And that changes the way you live a lot. Because now you understand that your life has never been, is not, and will never be about you.
Not anymore than the life of the apple tree is about one apple blossom, right? It would be a very neurotic apple blossom, one who thought it's about me.
Andrea Hiott: No,
Bernardo Kastrup: it's about the apple tree. And you are just part of that impersonal thing.
Andrea Hiott: So
Bernardo Kastrup: I understand Bernardo Castro to be the apple blossom. In other words, it's about nature.
And what nature is trying to achieve through me. It's not about me. Therefore, I do not have the responsibility to make myself happy, which is the most overwhelming task that the cultural ethos invests us with. One, it's impossible. There are way too many variables at play for you to be able to control them.
So you can not make yourself happy. [02:05:00] You may find yourself happy, because of grace and circumstance but it's not something that you can force in nature. And parting with that needs to make myself happy. It's like removing a ton of weight from my shoulder. Um, I know long term plan.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Bernardo Kastrup: That that's
Andrea Hiott: not surrender, but I think that's what I was trying to get at with that word.
It's like what you said about lifting the weight off, but
Bernardo Kastrup: It sounds like it's something you decide, right, like an army decides it's time to surrender. It's almost like yielding
Andrea Hiott: or aligning or it's, it's like you. It's not an action
Bernardo Kastrup: of me. It happens to me.
Andrea Hiott: Mm hmm. But you're kind of letting life flow through you without needing to filter it through Bernardo, the narrative.
Bernardo Kastrup: You could say that. So I, I pay attention [02:06:00] to my impersonal inner compass. Where is nature wanting to go through me? And my job is to accept that and then use my intellectual abilities to make it more viable or to facilitate that process. So. I the metaphor I use in the book, I, the way I live life now is as a driver who didn't choose the destination.
I am given the destination by the impersonal, but I am trusted with navigating the terrain. And therefore, I do it with the curiosity of someone who doesn't know where he's going, but will find out and is trusted with navigating it. So which is fun. I love that.
Andrea Hiott: Especially after the story you told about.
Driving and not knowing you're driving, because that's the opposite, right? It's being fully aware and present that you're driving, but not needing to know where you're going to go. I don't choose the direction. Choosing the direction. I've just chosen a
Bernardo Kastrup: completely different direction from you now with the synthetics.
That's very peaceful
Andrea Hiott: in a way. I can feel it. I don't know how to put words on it, but I can [02:07:00] feel it. And I already kept you way over time. But I have to ask, last thing is, how does that, does that relate to love at all? Or how do you see that word relative to this? Is it, does it turn you, is it a word you don't use or I bring it up because it makes people uncomfortable and
Bernardo Kastrup: well now it's I You know, we all have our prejudices.
I'm no exception to this. I have a prejudice against sentimentalism it's something that makes me cringe very quickly
Andrea Hiott: me too, but I don't think that word is that so that's why yes that's why I try to make this uncomfortable space because
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, I know what you mean. So I'll try to navigate that without falling for the trap.
Love is a fact of nature, just as fear is and hate is. and suffering. Yes. So if we accept that all these things are inherent in the potentialities of nature, [02:08:00] then yes, love exists. What I see a lot of people do, especially people in the spiritual, Circle and, and, and look, I'm not an enlightened being and they may be, I'm sure enlightened beings exist.
I know of at least one that monk who set himself on fire during the Vietnam war and stayed in a meditation position for the 20 minutes it must have taken for him to actually die. Didn't move a muscle completely. Yeah. No change in his facial expression. That's enlightenment. All right. That's it. You don't do that if you're just fooling yourself that you are enlightened.
That's it. That's mastery of one's own mind. That's a direct connection to what is really true. So it exists. Beyond that, I don't know who is enlightened, but some people who claim or are perceived as being enlightened will tell you that love is more fundamental than fear, than hate, than all the rest. I don't know that from personal [02:09:00] experience.
And there is no analytic line of thinking that I can think of that would lead you to that conclusion. Every piece of evidence I know and every piece of reasoning I trust would bring me to the conclusion that love is as true as all the other feelings. So it's as true as hate. It's as true as fear. It is true.
It's just not more true than, than the other stuff. So does love exist in my life? You bet it. You bet. Um, we, we, we get confused sometimes about it. We mix up love with infatuation. We mix up love with dependency. Um, so, but, but now I'm turning 50 and I think I have earned enough maturity now to know what is true love.
And it's there, it is there in my life. Anxiety is there and even hate. I could tell you today, I hate Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. [02:10:00] I wish that guy wasn't born. And at the same time, there is a bigger voice in me saying, that's silly. If he wasn't born, somebody else would have been born. And do something like that.
Maybe not the same thing, but something like that was going to happen. Was bound to happen because it can happen and if it can it will it would have another name another face Different circumstances may be a different part of the world, but it was going to happen. And yes, it's true And yet I can't help but look at that guy's face And I feel like laser beams are coming out of my eye.
Of my eyes, if you know what I mean.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I do. I think we all know in some situation or another like that. And I think it's important to feel it and be able to express it. And, um, I won't argue with you about that. Love being different from that. But when I listen to you or when I read [02:11:00] you, or when I think about all that you've done and all that you do in terms of all these kinds of conversations you have with people, writing all the books and stuff from my definition of love, which is, I don't, I won't try to put it in words, but it feels like that's there, you know, it doesn't feel like, um, hate is there, or I know you've said fear is there, but it doesn't feel like, love feels different to me as being able to connected with that flow that I was talking about of life kind of going through, to me, it feels almost more like, that's kind of when you're, All the other stuff is out of the way somehow, which doesn't make all the other stuff less real or not important But just looking at your life from the outside it seems like that would be more of extreme and the other things would be more like Lenses or obstacles or something, but that's Yeah
Bernardo Kastrup: Okay, and I mean
Andrea Hiott: even love like philosophy and too like I don't mean love in a sentimental infatuation.
I [02:12:00] mean as a motivating movement
Bernardo Kastrup: I identify people in the world. I feel very human.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that's what I mean. Even when you just described your hate, right? That's coming from
Bernardo Kastrup: a very deep
Andrea Hiott: identification.
Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah, I prize it very much. And one danger that people playing the social role I play go through, and I'm subject to that danger, is people want to kick you upstairs.
If you know what I mean.
Andrea Hiott: Name you and label you or Oh, they
Bernardo Kastrup: put you on a pedestal. They elevate you and therefore they make you non human.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at earlier, of how easily you can get trapped by your own accomplishments. Well,
Bernardo Kastrup: I, I, you know, I, I Not you, but one. I don't do that to myself.
No, no, I'm past that. Well, you've sort of built
Andrea Hiott: that into your system, but
Bernardo Kastrup: I haven't been in that city for a few years now. No, I'm not [02:13:00] going to fall for that trap. I'm not going to believe myself to be something more than human. I know too much the shit and the skeletons in my, in my cabinets to, to, to entertain that fantasy.
No, I don't think, I think we are all, nobody's immune to that, but I think I am as, Partially immune as one can get at this point. I know too much of my own shit But others do that and others kick you upstairs and This is not a criticism to them. They are not doing this maliciously. Actually, they think they're honoring you.
They think they're doing something positive towards you. But I feel robbed of my humanity when people do that. So my humanity is my greatest treasure. I'm going to defend it with tooth and claw. If you try to dehumanize me, Anyway, like making me better than human or lesser than human, I'm going to resist that [02:14:00] and, um, that has brought me to a place of contentment.
I'm not going to use the word, word happiness, especially because in the U. S. What people understand, Or the word happiness is very different than what we understand in Europe. In Europe, I could use the words happiness and contentment as equivalent. In the US, it, they aren't. In the US, happiness is something somehow more effusing, more effervescent than contentment.
While for the European, happiness is just contentment. So, I, I, I achieved a point. I've landed, I didn't achieve, I didn't do anything, I landed in a point of contentment in my life because of my humanity, my, my having achieved a warm, respectful relationship with my own humanity, which I treasure a lot. [02:15:00] And that, and that may be what you mean by By surrender, there is an involuntary letting go associated with that.
Letting go. That's
Andrea Hiott: better. Yeah.
Bernardo Kastrup: You're human. You are in a human journey. That's it. That's just nature. So. Let's just journey. Let's just go through this without trying to wrestle control of the reins of my journey from the hands of nature and control everything and assert my personhood, my uniqueness, as if we were it.
Ubermensch as if we were superhuman like Nietzsche tried and failed for a reason because there isn't a better man to try that And even that man. No, and
Andrea Hiott: he tried so with such heart and Totally understandable.
Bernardo Kastrup: That's the last that he left for us. That's his sacrifice So I am I am free from the temptation of trying to control life in the world.
I did try it I tried it for [02:16:00] over two decades with the illusion that it could be achieved And then I realized it can't and then I fell into into hell for over 10 years and now I am reconciled with my humanity, with my role as just a blossom in the apple tree, you know, that controls nothing, but has its role to play, just like me.
I don't control anything. I have my role to play and I'm in peace with it. And let's see what's going to happen next. So maybe that's what you call surrender, but it's not an act. I, I didn't one day wake up and say, okay, today I'm going to surrender. It happened to me. I find myself in this space.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's still to know what it's almost like a recognition too, you know, like, Similar to what you described when you had the feeling that you're not the world, you know But the opposite like you realize you are the world But what you thought was the world is something different now because you've made this whole journey Through all these stuff [02:17:00] and you persisted and when you're talking I was also thinking something I remember reading or hearing you say about um, You The heart being the, no, the intellect is the bouncer of the heart.
No, yeah. Yeah. And that would be a whole other conversation to open that up. But in a way you kind of could turn that around too. There's kind of a way like that. There's no bouncer anymore, right? But you don't need a bouncer anymore.
Bernardo Kastrup: Well, I, I think it's there. It's just that it's, um. A very open minded bouncer.
It's a kind and open minded bouncer. Yeah, I guess that's what
Andrea Hiott: I mean, because you say it as if the bouncer is bad, right? Because we pretend, like we use our intellect to say how we think we should feel, instead of looking at how we feel. But you kind of had to confront how you feel, and now you use the intellect to keep yourself in check or something.
I don't know.
Bernardo Kastrup: You know, I wouldn't underestimate. The [02:18:00] power my intellect still has in my life and, um, it's just that my intellect arrived at a place where it can give me permission for a lot of stuff, but it is still the bouncer. And when do I know that when I am exposed, for instance, I'm, I'm, I run essential foundation now, so I have I'm basically the curator of what we publish, what we promote and what we stay away from.
And because the essential foundation now. Has gotten some momentum. A lot of people want their voices to be amplified by us. So I mean that in the position of a sort of a bit of a gatekeeper, of course other people digest stuff for me But it comes to a point where I say, okay this we are going to run with and this we are not.
So I am regularly exposed to stuff that I take a quick look at and I think, oh shit. Woo woo! Nonsense! Scam, you know, we are not running with [02:19:00] this crap. Now. This is nonsensical And and that judgment call is often really intellectual and sometimes It flirts with prejudice, because, um, look, I'm human, right, and I'm in peace with being human, and part of being human is that you're prejudiced.
Well, you have a
Andrea Hiott: path, right, like we were talking about. I mean, you've come to where you are through certain references, even if you have learned the knowledge through prejudice. Yeah, acquisition or however you put it. I mean, you can't like just do away with the fact that you read all these books and know all these things and so on.
It's gonna Neither do
Bernardo Kastrup: I want to become the Ubermensch and be completely unprejudiced. I think what counts in my favor is that I recognize my prejudice and I try to deal with it in a healthy way as opposed to being completely overcome by it. But I still So even if I eventually get a hold of it and act in a non [02:20:00] prejudiced way, I feel the prejudice emerge within me at first, requiring the intellect to go there and say, wait, wait, wait, wait a moment, this, if you, if you say the same thing in words that you like better, You may actually be open to this.
You just don't like the particular words, the particular avenue in which this is being brought forth, or the motivations people have. You know, I'll tell you one big trigger for me, um, that triggers my prejudice very quickly, is when people defend a point of view about what is true. Because they think it's ethical, or because they think it makes them feel good.
There was a person once, I shall not name the person, but there was a discussion about metaphysics. And this person said, um, I don't like idealism because, um, it's totalitarian. It's one mind. [02:21:00] This is too totalitarian. It affects my political sensitivities. I think it should be a democracy. And I'm like, what does truth care about your damn political sensitivities?
About what makes you warm and fuzzy, and what gives you a cold shiver? Is this a bloody argument to make to defend a story? That really triggers me, and it happened to me the other day. A very respectable academic who I, Holding sincere high regard and was having we were having a private discussion. There were three of us and and this academic.
Lead into. The notion of we should promote this because it's conducive to better social harmony. We should promote this as true because it's conducive to more social harmony. Oh, that triggered me. It's like, why should I believe something to be true just because it triggers social harmony? If the truth is terrible and conducive to [02:22:00] anarchy and war, then That's it.
That's what the truth is. So, it, it, so this can happen even when the person's story is entirely reasonable. And we should promote it, but it's presented to me as we should promote it because it's good for people. It, it triggers me, so.
Andrea Hiott: I can understand that because it kind of is almost a sign that the person hasn't thought through it in a kind of deep way because it, it almost sounds like, you know, you just role play, like you, Take on a role of if it's social harmony is a good thing we've been taught.
And so therefore, if I fit this into that role,
Bernardo Kastrup: yeah,
Andrea Hiott: yeah, I see that
Bernardo Kastrup: there is even an argument to do that. And, and
Andrea Hiott: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bernardo Kastrup: And it's Nietzsche's argument. No, I think it is in the gay science or The joyful wisdom, because the word gay now has been associated with something else. But in, in the joyful wisdom, um, [02:23:00] the joyful wisdom sounds
Andrea Hiott: good.
Bernardo Kastrup: I think it is there that Nietzsche says, why are we all obsessed with what is true? Why does it matter what is true? We should adopt a narrative makes life good, not what is true. We can never know what is true and it doesn't matter because what matters is what effect it will have in life. So we, we, we simply should adopt a narrative conducive to whatever it is that we consider good.
He makes that argument. And it is a very compelling argument. The problem for me is that I am too instinctively committed to what is true. I do not have in me the ability to adopt a narrative and pretend that it is true just because. It's good in some way I I cannot make myself believe it [02:24:00] Actually it it will create the opposite reaction in me Even if it is believable Because i'm forcing myself to believe it because it's good Something in me will require and say, you know for that reason.
I will reject it even if it is plausible um, so I yeah, I I have
Andrea Hiott: yeah, I really understand there's two two things like one of those could just be You the philosopher in you, right? That you need to always question and stuff that, that always criticizing whatever it is, not just like there's a good and we go along with it.
But I think deeper than that, it's, it's kind of the way you've been living your life in this nestedness that I was talking about, I was saying like dissociation, but these many, many nested levels of consciousness, right? Where you, you can't. You can't just go along with something like that because it would numb that whole process.
Like, it's not, it's no longer the pattern that even works, right? It's a [02:25:00] totally different rhythm.
Bernardo Kastrup: But the conclusion, Andrea, is, and to go back to how we started this discussion, is the intellect is still strong in me. Not in the sense that it's a clever intellect, but in the sense that it, it has a lot of decision power for me.
It's very influential. So despite all this, Despite my being in a very different place in life than I was 20 years ago today. And despite my openness, which is there, I am much more open to alternatives that before I wouldn't take seriously. Despite all that, the intellect is still the bouncer of my heart.
It's just that it's a more sensitive and open minded bouncer now. But it can still shut the door. And it will shut the door. Every now and then it will just, no. No, here we are not going, because this is just nonsense. We are not, we are not approaching this.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think that's probably a healthy thing, especially as I've expressed it, I think you've opened your heart quite a lot, right?
[02:26:00] And to be able to do that, you need Some bouncers but um, for now, I just want to say thank you for i've kept you an hour and a half or I don't even know what time it is, but longer a lot longer and I could keep going because I didn't even look at half of my questions but mostly I just want to say thank you for your time and for what you're doing and that you are in Open to this whole process right and sharing all this in all the ways different ways
Bernardo Kastrup: Thanks for the opportunity.
It was a nice talk.
Andrea Hiott: It was and good night. I guess I can stop this.