Is Reality Made of Consciousness? - Dr Bernardo Kastrup, PhD

The universe has the network topology of a brain it it does suggest Again by a completely different line of argumentation and evidence that nature is mental and physicality is just a representation an alter appearance of [Music] mation Welcome to our psychology and nality Conference um so I'm here with the the speaker for our first talk Dr Bernardo castri before I introduce Bernardo I'm just going to go through some of the housekeeping for today so we're going to have three sessions and each is going to last approximately one hour there'll be 15 minutes for Q&A at

the end of each talk so if you have any questions please add them to the Q&A tab on zoom and please also note that we've got a limited amount of time available for the Q&A so please keep your questions as concise as possible and we're going to prioritize questions that Have been given the most thought our second talk is going to run from 2:30 to 3:30 and the final session will be from 400 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. UK time the itinerary can also be found in the link in the chat bar which my colleague L

is just going to share with you there now um so without further Ado let's start with our first talk Dr Bernardo castri is the executive director of asena foundation his work has been leading the Modern Renaissance of metaphysical Idealism the notion that reality is essentially mental he is two phds one in philosophy and another in computer engineering as a scientist Bernardo has worked for CERN and the Philips Research Laboratories where the kmir effect of quantum field theory was discovered his ideas and philosophy have been featured in Scientific American The Institute of Art and ideas the

blog of the American philosophical Association and big think among others Bernardo is The author of 10 books including titles such as decoding Young's metaphysics the idea of the world and why materialism is baloney you can learn more about his work by visiting w ww. Bernardo cast.com and if you're interested in submitting an article for publication via the asentia foundations Network please go to Essentia foundation.org submissions so Bernardo it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us here today and whenever you're ready uh get going Thanks NE it's a pleasure to be here thanks for the

opportunity um what I will basically do today I'm not a spiritual teacher I think you will find that out rather quickly uh I come from an analytic background from Hardcore analytic philosophy and computer science um so my message is based on reasoning and laboratory evidence and hopefully that will line up and Dove tail well with uh what you will Hear today from people who are probably a lot more spiritually aware and and clever than than I am uh I'll share my screen with you because I'll be I'll be using slid so I hope you can

you can all see uh my first Slide the topic is uh to answer the question is reality made of Consciousness as opposed to abstract quantitative matter as opposed to mass charge momentum spin is it made of thought like stuff idea like stuff and That's the question uh that I want to to address now um to think of reality in a different way uh whether you believe it or not but even to give the the hypothesis a serious chance um we have to change a certain perspective uh we have to regard the world through a or

from a slightly different perspective in order to give the hypothesis of fair hearing and these changes of perspective have happened many times uh in the history of Science and in the history of Philosophy one of the most fundamental changes of perspective happened uh in the 19th century when this man here to the left James Maxwell uh understood that um electromagnetism was better accounted for with the notion of feuds as opposed to the notion of particles little material beads bouncing around instead of that we had to think of electromagnetic effects as the work of invisible fields

that permeate space time and that do not have defined uh Physical boundaries so to say or defined spatial boundaries that's a better way to put it and of course uh once that changing perspective was done then then it opened up many many doors in science later on by the the first half of the 20th century this guy here to the right Richard fan understood that the best way to extend uh what was then new Theory quantum theory uh in a way that allowed us to for instance make sense of how particles interact with one another

Socalled particles the best way to do that was to understand the particles themselves as filled phenomena as to to understand particles as ripples in a river um there are no particles in the sense that there are no ripples except for the river there is only the river and the ripples are behaviors of the river they're not things in themselves in the same way and that's what this animation tries to to illustrate it is the the ible Quantum field that Underlies all nature the entire universe there are several Quantum Fields by the way it is that

invisible field when it behaves when it ripples that gives rise to what we call particles and particle interactions are just the interference patterns between ripples uh going through one another and that's all there is to it the whole of nature is Feud likee not uh uh body like not particle like um and and this view has been actually mainstream amongst people who Understand physics since the 1940s and Quantum Feud theory is the most successful theory in the history of science so can we hit a ride on this perspective on this Feud like understanding of nature

as opposed to the particle atom like understanding of nature in order to make the best inferences we can about what nature is as opposed to how it behaves if is nature material is nature spiritual whatever that means is nature thought Likee is nature ideal like um let's begin out that journey of changing our perspective and trying to give a fair hearing to another way of regarding uh the world um we have to start by understanding uh that physics may not necessarily be about a non Al material world out there what physics actually studies is what

we will see next even if what we will see Next is the output of an instrument a click from a photo detector even then the predictions of physical Theory are about what we will see next and that's the understanding that physicists like Marcus Miller from the aan Austrian Academy of Sciences are trying to get across all we have is perception we infer that there is a world isomorphic to perception a world that has the same Contours forms and shapes of perception Beyond perception itself but we are Cooped up in our own minds all we have

is perception and and perception is a mental that said of course there is a world out there U that is not part of our own minds and that's the reason why if you were sitting next to me you would describe my study a way consistent with my own description of it we inhabit a common world but that world is not necessarily physical because physicality refers to the contents of perception to the shapes and forms and dynamics of What we see on the screen of perception even if what we see is the output of instrumentation like

telescopes and microscopes and and oscilloscopes and what you have um the idea that the world out there is non-mental it's clearly beyond our personal Minds so let's acknowledge that the world of there is not in my mind alone obviously um but it may still be mental and not in my mind in the same sense That the thoughts of another person are mental but they are not in your mind you cannot uh change the thoughts of another person simply by exercising your will or your by imagining that they are different they are autonomous and objective from

your perspective but they are still mental the thoughts of another person are mental so the idea is could there be a world could the world that is clearly out there also be mental although not in our own minds just like The thoughts of another person are mental and are not in your mind we have to start from the world we see and we have to ask ourselves suppose you are in an airplane and you look through the window and you see a storm outside and a vast sky with lightning and and the sun setting and

whatnot is the world that is truly out there exactly the same as the world as we see it is what we see what we get is the World let's put it another way is perception a transparent window that allows us to see the world as it actually is that's the question and we have plenty of reasons to say no it cannot be now you don't need to look at the equations here I marked a lot of stuff I used this slide with a technical audience before but uh you can just follow my words and and

just know that there are technical papers out there that make this point very clearly and Very compellingly um we cannot possibly see the world as it truly is because there is no a priori upper bound to the variety of states of the world World they can be as varied as we can imagine or even more varied than that uh the technical word for that is the entropy of the world there is no upper bound to the entropy of the world so if we would see the world as it actually is it would require that our

inner cognitive States would mirror the states of the world and Then therefore there would be no upper bound to the diversity of our own inner cognitive States because there is no no upper bounds to the diversity of the states of the world which we are ex hypothesis mirroring now if there were no upper bounds to our inner cognitive State uh we wouldn't be able to maintain our structural and dynamical integrity uh to put it colorfully we would dissolve into hot soup because there would be no upper bound to our internal Entropy now we have never

seen somebody dissolving into hot soup just from looking at the world and that means that we do know not see the world as it actually is we cannot we wouldn't be able to survive what we see is an encoded representation of the world that conveys accurate information about the world but isn't the world and that's how we can survive another completely different but converging uh argument is evolution um it wouldn't be Evolutionarily advantageous for us to see the world as it is in the same sense that it it's not not advantages for us to see

the files in our computer for what they actually are each file on your computer is a set of millions of open and closed microscopic electronic switches if that's what you would see every time you you you you looked at a file on your computer you wouldn't be able to do anything with it you wouldn't even know what it is you would be Overwhelmed with information that you cannot act upon that's why computers operating systems they make a representation of the file a little colorful rectangle on your desktop and that's what you see that's what you

work with not the file as it actually is because that's not useful it's not functional so uh Evolution would have done the same thing as your computer desktop does it would give us icons representations of what's there uh in The world out there but the icons don't look at all like what is really out there they just convey important information about what what is out there but not with the same form with the same shapes with the same degree of entropy because we would be driven swiftly to Extinction if we actually saw the world for

what it actually is and this is a mathematical point that can be proven and has been proven so uh no we don't see the world as it is we don't Have a transparent windshield to see the world as it is what we have is a dashboard of dials and those dials convey accurate and important information about the world but they aren't the world and they don't look like the world either an airplane pilot can fly without without looking through the window just by looking at the instrument so the instruments are reliable and important but they

aren't the world now perception is like the Dashboard so what we call colloquially the physical world the world of things we can touch smell uh feel the texture off feel the temperature off uh taste uh see hear that's the dashboard everything you see here and smell these are the dials of your dashboard that has been evolved by natural selection um and they convey important information about the world that help you maintain your inner entropy bounded so you don't melt into hot soup and helps you be able to act on That information without being overwhelmed by

it like the little rectangles on your computer desktop that don't overwhelm you like the file the true version of the file would with the millions of open and closed microscopic switches so the physical world what we call Cally the physical world is but a dashboard and what is behind the dashboard the thing that is measured for the measurements to then be presented in the dials of the dashboard that's the World as it actually is that's the real world and the question we want to ask is what is that real world if physicality is the dashboard

then that world is by definition not physical because it's that which stands behind the dashboard what is it then so just to reinforce it we don't have a transparent uh wind screen we only have the dashboard and instrumentation doesn't change this dashboard Paradigm because even if you Have a telescope you still have to perceive the output of the telescope you still have to perceive the output of instrumentation so all of that gets filtered through the dials of the dashboard and at the end of the day all you have is still the dials of the dashboard

you've never had a peak U through a transparent window to see the world as it actually is and we are now at a point where we can say this is as near to a established fact as we can Get now physics it turns out is pointing in the same direction there has been a flurry of very important papers over the last 40 years particularly over the last 20 um that show that physical entities do not have Standalone existence and by the way these series of experiments have received the the Nobel Prize in physics this year

the three laurates uh were the people who have developed and and evolved and improved these experiments and carried them out for the past 40 Years and the experiments go as such as follows suppose you produce two so-called particles they're ripples they're not particles but I'll keep calling them particles to surrender to the linguistic convention let's suppose two particles were created together like two photons particles of light and one Photon a is shot to the left and Photon B is shot to the right both at the speed of light and after a certain distance a little

while Later uh uh Photon a arrives at alysis measurement instrument like a camera and Photon B after the same interval of time uh arrives at another measurement instrument that scientist Bob is wielding now it turns out that what Alice chooses to measure about Photon a determines what Bob sees about Photon B what Photon A and B are physically their physical properties which Define what they are depends on a measurement choice in other words before we make a Measurement we cannot say that there are these physical entities called photons A and B we experiments do not

do not allow us to say that it makes no sense to say that photons A and B were there before measurement of course there was something there before measurement there was the thing that was measured you measured something you don't measure nothing um but what you measure was not a photon was is not a physical entity the photon is the outcome of measurement Physicality is what arises from an act of observation and this shouldn't come as a surprise because you know if the physical world are dials on a dashboard if the airplan sensors don't make

a measurement of the real sky behind the dashboard then the DI show nothing is that surprising if you don't measure the dashboard shows nothing of course it doesn't now it does that doesn't mean that there is no world out there it only means that the world out there is not The dashboard the now Port that to physical physicality if you don't measure there is nothing physical that doesn't mean that there is nothing you do measure there is something out there that you do measure but that something is not physical so if you don't measure it

you don't get physicality because physicality is the dashboard the it's not surprising it's it the fact that the measurements performed by Alice and Bob Are completely correlated despite Alice and Bob not communicating with one another shouldn't be a surprise either imagine that there is a football match or a soccer match if you're American a soccer match in a stadium and you are a fan of soccer but you can't go to the stadium so what you do is you buy two television sets two enormous television sets and you watch the same match from the comfort of

your living room through two different broadcasters so You tune in to the first broadcaster on the first television set television set a and you tune in to another broadcaster in television set B uh and suppose also that the broadcasters have different cameras at the stadium so the images on the two TV sets will be different but they will be completely correlated because they are both images of the same soccer match now imagine that somebody from the 19th Century time travels to your living Room to watch to watch the match with you and our 19th century

time traveler will notice that the images in the two television sets are completely correlated if the little man on the box to the left run that way then the little man in the inside the box to the right run that other way always in sync with one another it's as if the little man on either box on both boxes knew where the little man on the other box we're going to go and Then they their behavior is completely correlated but there is no communication between the two boxes wow that's a miracle our time traveler thinks

this is discombobulating how can this possibly be how can they know where the other little men in the other box are going to go how does the ball know where the ball in the other box is going to go now you see the mistake our time traveler makes is to take the images on the TVs for the thing in itself for the actual Soccer match for the real world out there that's why the whole thing looks discombobulating but we know that what the television set show are just images representations the output of measurements on a

dashboard the TV being the dashboard uh the little men are not inside the TVs they are not the real little men the real men are in the so soccer stadium far away so for us the correlation between the two images is not discombobulating We understand it now when we become discombobulated by the new experiments in physics the ones that got the Nobel Prize this year we are making the same mistake as our 19th century time traveler we are like 19th century people regarding 21st century experimental evidence that's our mistake because we think the physical world

is the thing in itself it is the soccer match but no the physical world is the image on a television Set and that's why those images sometimes are correlated even though the TV sets are not communicating because they are not the actual World they are images on the television two planes flying in the same patch of Sky have two different dashboards now the measurements on both dashboards will correlate with one another not because the two dashboards are talking to one another but because they're measuring the same patch of Sky outside so why Should we be

this combobulated when two dashboards show correlated measurements even though they're not communicating with one another we only become discombobulated if we think that the dashboards are the world as opposed to being just a representation of the world in conclusion The World Isn't physical unless you adopt some woo woo physical fantasy like multiple parallel universes popping out every fraction of a second for which we Have no shadow of empirical evidence uh or the imagined but undetermined fantastic hidden variables of super determinism for which we also don't have a shred of evidence if you abandon this great

to unparsimonious physical fantasies then you you have to face the conclusion that the physical world is the outcome of measurement or observation while the real world behind it the thing that is observed the thing that is measured it's not physical so What is it and that's a a diagram to show you my my point of view U the Inner Circle in dark gray are our inner cognitive States is what we feel from within our own personal mind now there is a light gray blanket around it with sensory States in other words the states of our

retina of our eardrums the states through which we interface with the real world out there which is represented by the white circle um and our blanket which Technically is called a mark of blanket also has active States like when we move to interfere with the world you do that if you pick up a broom and you swipe the floor you are picking up the broom and swiping the floor those are active States now my point is that the physical world is the mark of blanket and it's not the external State and that's the world we

live in in it's the white circle those are the real states of the world out there the world that doesn't Care whether we are here or not that is what we what it is regardless of whe whether we measure it or not the physical world on the other hand are our personal Mark of blanket they are our personal representation of what's out there our individual dashboards and each one of us has a dashboard just like each plane in the same patch of sky has its own dashboard and because we are all measuring the same external

States represented here by the Greek letter F Our dashboards show mutually consistent measurement results which which is what happens when we say well indeed we live in a world where there are cars and trees and buildings yes our dashboards are consistent with one another because each of our dashboard uh is measuring the same world out there but the physical world world is the dashboard it is the mark of blanket each one of us of us has a physical world surrounding us like a Blanket uh and that physical world is what happens when we measure the

world outside when we measure the real world but the real world fi is not physical because it's not the blanket it's what is beyond the blanket now the the Greek letter is and it helps physicists get the picture um don't get frightened by the technicalities here now some people might say well wait a moment Bernardo if you are saying that our mental States because our Perceptions are mental States the color we see is a mental state the smell we feel is a mental state the flavor is a mental state what I'm saying is that those

mental states are does sort of primary because the physical world is just our own Mark of blanket it's our own dashboard and and our dasboard is mental so our our mental states are then primary doesn't that contradict Neuroscience because don't we know that our mental States uh uh um are derived Somehow from brain activity which is physical well no we don't know that at all nobody in the history of science let alone Neuroscience has ever managed to explain explicitly and coherently how physical quantities like Mass charge momentum frequency amplitude and so on give rise to

qualities like what it is like to to see red what it is like to have a belly ache to fall in love to be disappointed to regret to smell coffee nobody has ever made that link not not Even a step in the direction of making that link as a matter of fact we have plenty of laboratory reasons recently uh to conclude that this is actually not the case until 10 years ago everybody took it for granted in Neuroscience that psychedelics for instance worked by uh lighting up your brain like a Christmas tree by increasing brain

activity because that would be the way to explain the Psychedelic experience which is unfathomably Rich intense uh to explain That in terms of brain activity if you have such rich and intense experiences then you have to have very intense brain activity because experience is the result of brain activity right well it turns out that psychedelics do not increase brain activity at all they only reduce brain activity and they reduce brain activity significantly you see what you see here in blue are the areas of the brain um that have significantly less activity compared to Placebo Compared

to our normal Baseline and despite your brain effectively going to sleep well not even going to sleep because your brain is pretty active when you are asleep um how do I even describe this um activity in your brain reduces while you're having the most intense baffling uh Rich uh um discombobulating experience of your life and it's not just one paper and this is another one in this study here LSD was stud was used in the Previous slide I showed psilocybin or magic mushrooms where the Psychedelic used here you have LSD and here they they broke

the results down into different frequency bands of brain activity you can look here at the bottom of the picture the power spectrum they call it Spectra I okay Spectra there are two spectrums here um and you see that under the psychedelics uh uh brain activity uh the Power spectrum of brain activity uh reduces across the entire band across all frequencies uh and this was measured with Meg in the previous one was measured with fmri so we are talking about different psychedelics different measurement apparatuses and the same results and there are many many papers now that

have been produced over the last 10 years and they all show the same thing and this is a case Where although brain activity and experience are correlated most of the times there is no denying that this is a case where one Black Swan refutes the theory that all swans are white so even though most swans are white in other words most of the times brain activity goes hand inand with uh experience the intensity and richness of experience sometimes it goes the other way and that's your Black Swan and that's what defeats the theory that all

Experiences are generated by brain activity clearly that's not the case and then you have to ask is then any experience generated by brain activity could experience have two completely different causal causes uh that's very unlikely too now of course Neuroscience which is largely materialist U they went out and tried to measure something in the brain that re that increases when uh you are having a psychedelic experience there Must be something if it's not activity then something else must increase when you have a psychedelic experience and they did find something that increases and that's brain noise

which they call Randomness or entropy or big names diversity they call it uh but it's just noise it's TV static in your brain so when you have a psychedelic your brain activity decreases a lot but the residual brain activity that still stays there has a little bit more TV static in It now how much more well brain static increases by 0.005 in a scale from 0 to 100 it in other words to say that it's a microscopic increase is is the understatement of the of the century it's hardly detectable and to say that the power

the richness the intensity of a psychedelic Tron can be explained by this pent increase in TV static in the brain is just Preposterous it's probably the most one of the most Preposterous Ideas ever taken seriously in Neuroscience which reviews our psychological prejudices now when it comes to understanding what the world is moreover many of the subjects studied uh their brain static uh decreased while they were having the Psychedelic Ron what you see here in this slide is a statistical result for many people brain static decrease then they still had the Psychedelic experience um anyway I

just wanted to mention this and it's not only Psychedelics many other things that impair or reduce uh ordinary brain activity have been shown to correlate with enriched intenser experience this is a study done in Italy 12 years ago published in neuron in which patients um that had tumors in their brains were studied before and after surgery for the removal of the tumors and surgery always has some collateral damage in surrounding tissue and it turns out that uh an index called self Transcendence Which which is a the subjective experience of um how rich you are as

an entity whether you transcend just your body whether you are also part of the world this this is known as Oceanic uh Consciousness in Psychology the more of that you have the richer and intenser is your experience of life and it turns out that uh uh there is a marked increase in uh this index of self Transcendence before and after surgery and for the control groups for the placebos Effectively there is no change in that index so apparently brain damage leads to intenser broader richer experience um and not only damage from surgery even War trauma

there's a group of vietnan War veterans over 100 of them that were used um that were studied uh and it turns out that lesions on specific parts of the brain increase the likelihood of transcendent religious experiences which are very powerful very intense very rich and they correlate With u impaired brain activity with lesions uh in the brain um even the study of uh so-called mediums in Brazil this is 2013 people who claim that they can write down information from Transcendent sources I reserve judgment about about that uh but I cannot uh ignore the actual result

of the experiment in which researchers put U these mediums in a brain scanner uh and they measured that brain activity while they were writing down this information Allegedly from some Transcendent Source uh and it turned out that uh uh their brain activity which you see here in red before and after well before TR and after trans for different parts of the brain uh decreases while they were uh in TR decreased precisely in the areas of the brain responsible for language processing and rationality the areas of the brain you would expect to be hyperactive if you're

engaged in an in an intellectual activity like a writing Down something wring writing a paper writing a book and for the controls that brain activity predictably increases a lot when they are writing down something and then you might ask well maybe what the so-called mediums wrote down was much simpler therefore they didn't have to engage their brain that much but researchers are not so silly they're not so naive so they used objective means to score the complex it of the textt written there are computer systems now That can score text for complexity uh not only

in in in syntax and grammar but also semantic complexity and it turns out that what the mediums wrote down while their brain activity decreased was significantly more complex than what the controls uh uh uh uh wrote down while not entrenched so I could go on and on and talking talk about a number of other things that uh um uh reduce brain activity and are correlated With richer experience for instance the this choking game that teenagers play worldwide in which they they partly strangle themselves to cut blood flow to the brain which reduces brain activity of

course um but they do that because it gives them a high they trip they have like a psychedelic trip very rich very intense they go to alien worlds and all kinds of things um and that happens because they cut blood flow to their brain so I could go on and on and talk All day about this things but the message is there is a whole flock of black swans that refutes the notion that brain activity generates experience and therefore we have to maybe start making peace with the possibility that the world out there as it

actually is isn't physical that physicality is just an appearance of that world that our brain activity is just an appearance of our inner experience not their cause and that's why brain activity ordinarily Correlates with inner experience because it's the image of inner experience it's what inner experience looks like from the outside it's a representation on a dashboard of experience outside and behind the dashboard that's what that's what the brain is it's a dashboard representation of your inner experience of my inner experience um so in conclusion and just to recapitulate uh we cannot perceive the world

as it actually Is perception is a dashboard we get encoded information representational information about the world as it actually is and therefore physicality is just that representation it's just an appearance of a deeper layer of reality that we can interface with with only through physicality only through the dashboard and not directly and because physicality is the dashboard then whatever is behind the dashboard is by definition not physical To use the same word for the dashboard and the sky outside is it's artificial right it's cumbersome at the very least if not just stupid uh so let's

not do that the world is not physical we can arrive at this conclusion from very independent lines of evidence from foundations of physics we know that physical entities do not have Standalone existence they only come into being upon a measurement the thing that you measure in the first place isn't physical and From the Neuroscience of conscious there are many situations in which brain activity does not correlate with the richness and intensity of experience which is the flock of black ones that def refutes the notion that that experience is generated by brain activity so if you

want to do physics in a levelheaded way without the metaphysical Prejudice that the world as it is in itself is also physical we have to remain agnostic and say the world is It actually is uh we cannot become acquainted with it directly at least not in principle I'm sure there will be spiritual teachers speaking after me that will try to help you become directly acquainted with the actual world through introspection as opposed to through perception and I do take that seriously I have never managed to achieve that myself because I'm just not an enlightened being

but I do not dismiss the claim because I think the Claim is coherent and it's not even implausible so if we want to understand uh uh what the world really is we need this shifting perspective and we need to understand that mind is not necessarily what is in here it may also be what is out there it may still be mental out there although not in your personal mind just like the thoughts of another person are out there from your perspective but not in your personal mind and the whole World the whole universe the entirety

of existence may be mental stuff mental Dynamics and we are just a little segment of it psychological complex of it to put it that way hey Bernardo so thank you very much for a fascinating uh presentation there I really enjoyed that um to get started Bernardo I just like to ask you how does the structure of the brain correlate with the structure of galaxies in the universe and what are the implications of of this from your Point of view so you're alluding to Recent research U which is not based only on comparisons of pictures because

you can make any two things look alike in a picture if you crop it just the right way and you process the colors and the contrast in just the right way no the research was done based on the reliable and rather objective tools of information Theory and network topologies and what turns out to be the case is that the network topology of the Universe at its largest scales um is surprised ly similar to the network topology of ml mammal brains biological brains now we do not have anything in science today that allows us to account

for this it's it from that perspective it's a very surprising result uh but from a philosophical perspective um it's not really surprising is it because if physicality is what mentation looks like from the outside and and and and that is the Reason why a brain is what it is because it's what my inner mentation looks like from the outside my mentation looks like the network topology that we call a brain when it's looked at from the outside when it's probed and measured from the outside if that's what my mentation looks like it looks like a

brain then it stands to reason to imagine that if the whole universe is made of mentation as well it's mental too then it too should look like Something like a brain now we have to be careful the universe doesn't look really like a brain in the sense that it's not made of carbon atomos and metabolizing neurons and you know it's not the brain but the network topology is very similar to the brain and what this seems to suggest is that the similarity arises because the universe as a whole is also mental just like my private

mentation uh but the mentation of the universe is not exactly like my Mentation as a monkey running around a rock hurtling around the Sun of course it isn't why should it be why should I anthropomorphize the universe so much but it it is very suggestive perhaps more than suggestive that the Universe has the network topology of a brain it it does suggest Again by a completely different line of argumentation and evidence that nature is mental and physicality is just a representation an alter appearance of mentation in the Talk you covered a lot around things like

you know psychedelics and how this actually reduces brain activity and that leads to actually an enrichment of experience and there's other examples of that as well where Pilot Pilots going to centrifuges or uh the choking game that teenagers play where you've reduced mental activity and you've got an expanded Consciousness or an expanded awareness you reduce brain activity brain activity um so the question I want To ask him what are what are your thoughts on death if this is the case you know if brain activity being reduced enhances uh Consciousness to to some level um what

do you think about about what happens after death I think what we call Life biology is what a dissociative process in a field of subjectivity underlying all nature looks like in other words a leaving breathing metabolizing body is what dissociated mentation looks like that's what life is Life is the appearance of dissociated mentation in the mind of nature so what is death the end of life well it's the end of dissociation right if life is what dissociation looks like the end of life is the end of dissociation it's a reabsorption of our seemingly private mental

activity into the broader mind of nature into mind at large and um even the dashboard suggests that what happens to a person when the Person dies well first there is an immediate change in what we call the body it stops metabolizing the outer appearance may still look like the same thing but it's completely different from the inside instantly because metabolism stops instantly and metabolism is the key characteristic of life and that ends the moment you die um and then the body decomposes and becomes reabsorbed into the Earth and becomes recycled into nature so even The

dashboard is suggesting that that death is the reabsorption of our mental activity into the mind of nature in other words it's like waking up from a dream because when we dream we we become internally dissociated we think we are the little Avatar in the dream and not the rest of the dream not the trees and cars and buildings around the Avatar when we wake up that inner that inner dissociation ends and we realized that We were not only the Avatar we were the thing doing the entire dream so your avatar your dream Avatar is dead

when you wake up he's toast he's done with when you wake up but nobody goes around crying and mourning the death of their dream Avatar when they wake up in the morning I suspect real death is this the same um the dream Avatar is gone because the Avatar is what a dissociative process looks like death is the end of that dissociation so Bernardo cast is Gone because Bernardo castr is a dissociative process but the eye behind my eyes the subject behind my thoughts behind my delusions behind my fantasies that subject goes nowhere where is it

going to go uh that subject sort of wakes up from dissociation and I don't think it will go around mourning the death of Bernardo C okay so you've talked there quite a bit about Association and for anybody that is maybe wanting to Understand this a bit better you you often use a very helpful metaphor about this this woman in a study I think it was in 2015 German scientists use EEG can you tell us about that and how this can help us understand this dissociative process a bit better so dissociation happens when one mind seemingly

fragments itself into multiple distinct centers of awareness each Center has its own memories its own personality dispositions uh values and so on it used To be called an extreme form of dissociation used to be called multiple personality disorder but now with the dsm5 we call it well for several years now we've been calling it um dissociative identity disorder or D which is the correct name now now we have known did clinically for about 200 years records go back that far uh but there was always the hypothesis that um people are dis simul a in it

that people are pretending to be Dissociated to that degree in order to get attention or whatever however for the past 20 years since the Advent of neuroimaging we know objectively now that the actually happens and it's it's not people pretending there was a study done in the Netherland in 2014 in which uh brain scans were done of uh people suffering from did and actors pretending to themselves to be dissociated and it turns out there is a marked difference between the two brain scans there is Something dissociation looks like in a brain scan and it can

be diagnosed objectively that way and the most uh remarkable study is the one you refer to a woman in Germany who had multiple dissociated centers of awareness they are technically called alters and some of the women's altars claimed to be blind while the woman could see perfectly the host personality could see perfectly so um the psychiatrists had this brilliant idea of putting an an EEG Cap to measure her brain activity uh both when a blind alter was in control in exactive control and when uh non-blind alter took over executive control and lo and behold the

brain activity in the visual cortex at the back of the brain disappeared when a blind alter was in control even though the woman's eyes were open so that's not something you can fake that's not something you can pretend um dissociation can literally make you Blind to what is right in front of your open eyes and of course when a cited personality a cited alar would come back in control brain activity normal brain activity would return to the to the visual cortex so dissociation is powerful to the point of literally making you blind to what is

right in front of your open well-working eyes so is it surprising that it makes me blind to your thoughts that it makes me blind to what's happening in China of course It's not and I think that's what's happening that's why living beings seem to have private mental inner life even though they are part of the broader mind of nature they are blind to whatever is beyond their dissociative boundary just as that woman's alter was blind to what was in front of the woman's open eye that's uh that's mindblowing um Okay so we've got a question

here from uh Timo Peters what are the best arguments you have found against your position of Phil Philosophical idealism and why what are your counter arguments there why are they wrong um I think the most the strongest argument uh would be the notion and and by the way I think it's a it's based on a false assumption I would discuss that but on Face Value the strongest strongest argument is the notion that we are compound beings we are made of trillions of cells our brain is made of countless billions of neurons so looks like we

are made of parts we Are compound beings and if so and our Consciousness correlates with this compound body then our Consciousness should be compound as well in other words our Consciousness should arise out of the combination of little mental states of neurons or perhaps even molecules and subatomic particles like pists put forward and in that case um the structure of the world would be the structure of the physical world right because uh we are assuming That at the bottom level of reality the world is compound and we are compound beings made of little parts and

th and thus so should Consciousness be and therefore idealism is incorrect because idealism which is what I just put forward uh uh uh infers that there is one unified field of subjectivity underlying all nature and that uh um parts and and and divisions are an artifact of the representation are an artifact of the dashboard of the screen Of perception just like your computer screen is made of pixels if I look closely at your image well I'm using a retina monitor but if I were using a normal Monitor and I looked close at your picture on

my monitor I would think that you are made of little rectangular blocks but of course that's an artifact of your representation on my monitor you are not made of rectangular blocks so I think that's one of the errors of this notion that we are compound beings and Therefore Consciousness should be compound should be made of Parts it mistakes the structure of the screen of perception for the structure of that which is perceived it's like thinking that you are made of re rectang go just because that's what your appearance in my monitor is made of as

to think that you are pixelated just because your image on my monitor is pixelated um another error is is the very assumption that we are compound beings we are not We would be compound beings if the following thing happened if trillions of little cells would crawl crawl towards one another and pile up of one another on one another until forming us if this were how we were born by little cells walking towards one another and piling up until they formed our body then we would be compound beings but that's not how it happens what happens

is that in the beginning we are a unified zygote a fertilized egg in Our mother's womb and what happens then is that that egg internally differentiates itself through a process we call mitosis or cell division our cells didn't walk towards one another didn't crawl towards one another to form us they are the result of the inner differentiation of one unitary uh entity which is the zy the fertilized egg I submit to you that we are still that zygote today zygote simply grew and differentiated itself Internally just like our ideas our mental life differentiates itself internally

we have more thoughts more perspectives more fantasies than we had when we were infants our mental inner life has differentiated and complexified itself while remaining unitary I submit to you that exactly the same happens in the case of the body we are still the zygote we are still that unitary zot we were when we were when the egg in our mother's womb was fertilized and when we Came into existence that zyg got simply grew mature and differentiated itself internally and we mistake cells for parts while in fact cells are just what the inner differentiation looks

like there are no cells there are no parts we are still design by God and there are no subparts to our conscious inner life it's still unitary it's one dissociative process to what extent do we live in a a purposeful Universe we Had a talk from um someone I think you spoke with in the past e m Gilchrist um and he made a very strong argument that values and purpose are almost embedded in the structure of being itself so I want to ask your thoughts on that and if if life exists for any reason at

all what might that reason be I personally although I would like to believe it I personally don't go as far as to think that the particular values of a particular culture at a particular Moment in history are somehow embedded in the fabric of nature like platonic archetypes like to be good and to be beautiful is embedded in the fabric nature as a platonic archetype I I personally cannot go that far far I don't think the evidence justifies going that far even though I would like to but I can't um I don't think there is a

deliberate thought through plan of nature for nature I don't think the evolution of history on this planet Or the cosmological evolution of the universe over the eons is the result of a crafted deliberate thought through plan by some kind of conscious day I don't think that's what's going on I'm a naturalist I think nature does what it does because it is what it is it acts is spontaneously because of the dispositions that constitute its being to be is to have dispositions to be is to have properties so nature does what it does because it is

what it is and not Something else and that's all there is to it it is remarkable how nature on this planet at least how much it seems to invest in the production of a species that is capable of metacognitive thought in other words a species that cannot only experience but that knows that it is experiencing a species with self-awareness uh with self-reflection metacognitive experience um because we are a Tremendous risk to Nature on this planet we can end it all tomorrow we can set nature back millions of years tomorrow by pressing a red button um

and we are solely responsible for one of the greatest Extinction events ever seen on this planet we are doing this it's the anop anthropos scene the time of man um that is causing this massive Extinction and despite all that nature and evolution seem to be pushing towards this this self-awareness the Self-reflection this capacity to think explicitly about the self to be self-aware um so I would suggest to you that yes there is a TS in nature there is a direction of EV of evolution there is a purpose but it's not an explicit deliberate purpose it's

an instinctual purpose it's the purpose of a cat that follows his nose to find the food the cat doesn't go well I feel hungry hungry now that means I'm low on calories therefore I have to find food because if I don't find food may not be able to survive so I have to find food and the sense of smell tells me in the direction of food and therefore I will proceed in that direction in order that I get food no no that's not what's happening in a cat's mind what's happening is spontaneous it's instinctive it's

a spontaneous reaction to this Mell of food and the need to be fed that naturally and spontaneously makes the cat move in the direction of food I Think it's in exactly this sense that nature is moving the direction of self-reflection spontaneously by reaction by Instinct not by deliberate planning and do you think then that this sort of Nal form of Consciousness that people like your colleague rert spy are teaching this increases an individual sensitivity to these things and enables that spontaneity to flow through them more do you think it's a good route to getting there

and the second part of That question is a lot of the you do is so that you're creating um a very strong logical argument for this point of view um for someone that is sort of hyper intellectual and really can't you know struggles to to um Embrace these ideas what are what what's your advice for a good starting point for them to sort of like a really good resource for them to start really engaging um maybe it's the centia foundation website or where's the first Place you would recommend them go so starting from the second

question first I think people who are intellectual and cannot part with their intellect um they cannot believe without couching that in a in a coherent conceptual narrative um people like me in other words what they have to do is to be consequent if you decide to follow your intellect then follow your intellect all the way without prejudice don't follow your intellect until halfway and then Take a turn based purely on pre Prejudice or un exam assumptions because that's just stupid to be just stupid to do that so if you really want to be intellectual and

intellectual and you are a materialist because you think the intellect points in that direction then pursue your intellect more consequently and you will see that it will move you away from materialism very quickly because materialism is just internally inconsistent incoherent phys empirically Untenable it it's just a [ __ ] show now how do you do that well you can go to the Essentia Foundation website essena foundation.org uh it's a foundation which I lead and it's dedicated to putting forward a intellectual empirical rational argument for idealism including no introspection no spirituality not because we against it

not at all uh but others are already doing that part the spiritual the introspective part so we focus on what we are good at which is to Put forward a rational empirical argument for the mental nature of reality now regarding your first question the value of non-dualism um to discern the true direction in which nature is pushing I think it has that value and it has that value because it reduces the noise uh we are contaminated by recipes that come from the culture about what life is all about and a very popular recipe today is

life is about becoming rich and famous and Powerful Richness Fame and power and and that's ridiculous nature doesn't give a damn about any of this these are human constructs that only have value within a particular human narrative uh that has nothing really natural going for it um so uh uh I think non-dualism by winning you out of that add that culture bound addiction which is nonsensical it helps you focus on other things and amongst these other things There may be the true purpose the the true TS of nature okay well we'll have to end on

that note um before you go Bernardo uh you have people can submit articles to the asena foundation's website for for review is that right can you tell us a bit more about that and if somebody listening to this would like to do that how would they go about doing that so I I don't want to make a blanket invitation for everyone to send us their writings because they will be Disappointed and they will just be overwhelmed with work uh we accept submissions of scholarly uh uh uh written work and when I say scholarly I mean

it doesn't need to be a text for A specialized academic Journal but it should be academic level um we publish academic level stuff written for the general public so if you are an academic mic a scientist a philosopher or or at least you have the background to be able to write uh uh in An educated manner about the subject you're writing on for instance you're practicing psychologist or psychiatrist a clinician or a physicist uh um then we welcome submissions of a academic level texts uh targeted at an educated audience okay awesome awesome right thanks for

having me it was a pleasure take care