Transcription
Objective reality out there. Are you comfortable with that? Absolutely. All life is conscious, even bacteria. Archaea are are conscious. How can we know that the Mind At Large really exists? The game of metaphysics is the game of coming out with the best hypothesis we can. It's not about proof. Even in science, there is no proof; there is only falsification.
In foundations of physics, people get very very confused today because measurements show that physical entities only exist after you measure them. And we get confused, and then we spend huge amounts of money trying to reconcile that with physicalism—nonsense. Physical stuff are representations, are dashboard representations. If you don't measure, you don't get physical stuff. All matter in your body and otherwise is the outside appearance of mental state. Matter is how mental states appear to an observer on the outside. There is no mind creating matter as a separate domain at a certain point in history. No, there has ever only been mind. There is no space and time. Space and time are cognitive categories that we invent to organize the information we get about the world. Space and time are our own cognitive filing cabinet. [Music]
What it knows through me is not accessible to what it knows through you, but you and I are it. The meaning resides in self-discovery. Oh, I am the agent who makes a choice like this, given this circumstances. We are the only metacognitive eyes through which nature can contemplate itself. Do you believe in [Music] God? Welcome to CIA Foundation Channel. Thank you for watching. Today I will be discussing with Bernarda Castr the most common questions you have asked after watching my interviews. I hope this will clear up at least some of your doubts. Hello Bernardo. Thank you for receiving us and for taking time for this Q&A session.
Pleasure. So the first question I have is, according to your theory of analytic idealism, the fundamental nature of reality is mental. Many people find it a challenging concept to grasp, especially concerning inanimate objects. So, for example, POI Anderson from Denmark writes to us, a quote: "I still struggle to completely comprehend the notion that nature outside our private experiences is mental. Is the stone on the beach mental in itself, or has it got the potential to be mental, for instance, in the me with the little boy measuring the stone by picking it up and throwing it into the sea?" End quote. So, in other words, does inanimate matter somehow acquire mental state by being observed or measured, if you will, by a conscious being like a little boy, or is everything inherently mental? And if so, how?
The point is that everything is inherently mental; that that's the basic starting point of analytic idealism. To give you an intuition of plausibility for that, think of your brain. Your brain is very material; right, you can weigh it, you can slice through it. It's made of the same kind of atoms that the rest of the physical universe is made of, and there is there is carbon, there is nitrogen, there is oxygen—same kind of atoms, some of them you're breathing right now. Um, and yet it is how your your mental inner life appears to observation. Your mental inner life looks like a brain from the perspective of someone else. So behind this very concrete materiality, we know that at least in the case of the nervous system of human beings, behind that, underlying that concrete materiality is just mental states: your sorrows, your desires, your regrets, your feeling of hunger, the redness of a strawberry, the sweetness of the strawberry when you eat it. And that all appears to others in the form of very concrete matter. So under analytic idealism, the same holds for everything, including the inanimated universe; otherwise we would have a sort of artificial boundary in nature. So under analytic idealism, all matter is just like the matter of the brain; it's the extrinsic appearance; it's what mental states look like when we observe them. In and of themselves, those states are not material.
How do we make sense of this? Think of the the dashboard metaphor. You know, you you are in an airplane. The airplane has sensors; it makes measurements of the sky, the clouds outside, and those measurements are presented to the pilot in the form of dial indications on a dashboard. If the the plane is not flying around the sky, there are no dashboard representations, but the sky is still there, right? So under analytic idealism, matter is a dashboard representation. When there are no planes flying around, in other words, when there are no living beings looking around, there is no matter, because matter is a dashboard representation. You need a dashboard to have a dashboard representation, but the thing that is represented—the sky, the clouds—that is always there, whether you're flying around in a plane or not, whether there is a dashboard or not. So under analytic idealism, the world as it is in itself is mental. Physicality is what that mental world looks like to us when we observe it, when we represent it in our internal dashboard, and then we get the material universe. The brain is a dashboard representation of a human being's inner life. We know that in our guts; we know that somehow correlated with that brain—very material brain, you know, three pounds of gray and white gray matter and and different tissues—um, correlates the entire inner life of a person, a universe of experience. Analytic idealism says the same applies for everything else. So PO was into something, onto something by saying that a little boy encountering a stone, somehow that's the moment where that's the moment when you represent the inner reality of the stone. Okay, so um, whatever this stone is mentally um only becomes what we call a stone when somebody observes it—a little boy on the beach, the little boy on the beach, somebody looks at it, picks it up and feels it. Um, but the intrinsic reality of the stone does not require observation; it's a mental reality which exists whether it's been observed or not. But so so it's the cloud in the sky, but when there is an airplane making measurements, then you get the dashboard representation; you get the material stone. The inner reality, however, is not observation-dependent; it's mental, and in that sense it is mental. Yeah.
What is the Mind At Large, and how do our individual minds relate to it? How can we know that the Mind At Large really exists? Do we have any proof of that? The game of metaphysics is the game of coming out with the best hypothesis we can. Um, it's not about proof. Even in science, there is no proof; there is only falsification. No scientific theory can ever be proven beyond any doubt. All you can say is we have done some experiments that didn't manage to falsify the the scientific hypothesis. So people make too much of proof. Proof is a concept that only exists in formal systems like mathematics. In mathematics you can prove a theorem. Um, in in science and philosophy, all the best you can do in a case of science is to manage to not falsify it, and in philosophy the best you can do is to say this is the most coherent, parsimonious, empirically adequate, and explanatorily powerful hypothesis we have. So that's the philosophy. Um, can we prove that there is Mind At Large? Under the premises of analytic idealism, all matter in your body and otherwise is the outside appearance of mental states. There is an inanimate world out there made of matter. So under that hypothesis that matter is always the external appearance of mental states, the inanimate universe must be the external appearance of mental states too. Those mental states that corresponds to the inanimate universe are what we call Mind At Large. So under the understanding of analytic idealism, obviously there is Mind At Large. Look around, look at the stars, look at the Moon, look at the beasts, the volcanoes, the mountains; those are all dashboard representations of the mental states of Mind At Large. There has to be an external world which we all inhabit. It's very difficult to get rid of this hypothesis, right, because you would describe this living room in the same way I would. So we clearly share a context. There has to be that world. Under analytic idealism, because everything is mental, we call that world Mind At Large. That's the world we inhabit, and obviously there must be such a world.
Here's a question from our viewer by the nickname DK tk1: I quote, "What are we here for, if for any purpose at all? Is each of us merely an instantiation of a wider consciousness whose sole purpose is to experience itself or enjoy itself in different formats?" End quote. In other words, how do you see the purpose of our purpose here and life in general? So the best I can do is offer a guess, because um, strictly speaking, we don't know whether there is a purpose. And analytical idealism is a naturalist philosophy, meaning um it acknowledges that nature does what it does spontaneously, not through the external intervention of a of a a Divinity outside nature. Um, so nature does what it does because nature is what it is. It has certain in dispositions that lead to regularities that we call gravity, uh electrostatic attraction, you know, the regularities that we call the laws of nature. So it is conceivable that there is no purpose, that everything that is happening is simply the expression of the natural archetypes of universal consciousness, or to say the same thing in other words, is simply the expression of the laws of nature, the play of what is. Um, so that would be the the more conservative um answer. Now if you ask me personally, not under analytic idealism, but personally, um if I use my intuitions, if you look at the history of the universe from 13.8 billion years ago until now, at least that the part that we know and what happened on this planet since 4 and a half billion years ago, um very quickly after the Earth cooled—the Earth was a bowl of lava in the beginning—very quickly after the crust cooled, life appeared. The Earth formed four and a half billion years ago; life was around 4 billion years ago. It's incredibly quick. Um, and then we observe that life has penetrated every conceivable environment on this planet. We find life wherever we look, even in extremely inhospitable environments of crushing pressure, uh uh dissolving acidity, acidity levels, uh uh melting temperatures; we still find life. Environments with no light, we still find life. There seems to be a big push in nature towards this thing we call life. You know, it pops very quickly and goes everywhere. Um, and what is the apex of life on Earth? Well, it's us. And what characterizes us as the apex of life on Earth? What enabled us to sort of take control of the entire planet, or at least try to? It's metacognition—the ability to reflect self, the ability to be self-aware, to deliberate, to ponder, to contemplate. My cats can't do that kind of contemplation; they don't walk around asking themselves what is the meaning of life and why nature is what it is. Uh, we do. So there, if I would risk an answer um that is not conservative but a risk a hypothesis that I think is plausible, all indications are that nature's instinctive spontaneous purpose is to develop the ability to self-reflect, and we are the means; we are the part of nature that can do that. We are the first; we represent the first time that nature could look upon itself and take explicit account of itself and say, "Oh, this is what's happening; is this good or is this bad?" Nature achieved this through us after 13.8 billion years at unfathomable cost. The amount of suffering through the course of evolution by natural selection that has played out in this planet is inconceivable; it's it's overwhelming. So the price has been enormous; the risk is enormous. We can end this planet tomorrow; goodness knows we're very close to to that. We don't end the planet; we can end civilization tomorrow. Give it a million years; the planet will be all right again, but we will not be around. Um, so the risk is enormous; the cost is enormous, and it all seems to be focused on this unique ability of nature through us to take explicit account of itself, to recognize itself at a metacognitive level and say, "Oh, this is what I am; this is what's happening." That seems to be the purpose of it.
Is all life conscious? I think all life is conscious, in the sense that all life has a private conscious point of view of its own. I think what we call life—biology, metabolism—is the appearance of dissociated complexes in the mind of nature that have acquired their own private point of view as opposed to the oceanic awareness of Mind At Large—this this holistic, you know, one ocean of consciousness. We sort of splintered off from that through dissociation—this this this this um dissociated little complexes that split off from Mind At Large. What they look like is what we call biology; is what we call life. Therefore, if this is true, then by definition they have their own dissociated private points of view; in other words, they are conscious. All life is conscious, even bacteria. Archaea, under this hypothesis, are are conscious. There is something it is like to be them. Where's the border? Is a virus conscious? Is the chair conscious? No, the chair doesn't metabolize; viruses don't metabolize either; they hijack a living creature to do the metabolism for them and do the reproduction for them. Um, look, even if I am wrong about where precisely the border lies, even if there is a gray area around the border, uh that still doesn't invalidate the hypothesis, because clearly there is a difference between things that are obviously alive, like um vertebrates, and things that are obviously not, like a rock. That difference is obvious and overwhelming. Only life does protein folding, transcription, mitosis, ATP uh creation and burning; nothing else in the universe comes anywhere close to this. So life is clearly a very distinct category, and my hypothesis is life has a conscious point of view of its own; the rest doesn't; the rest is part of the appearance of this oceanic awareness of Mind At Large. Um, but where precisely the boundary lies—so probably around viruses, archaea, right? My bet is viruses are not conscious; my bet is viruses are just particles; actually virologists um they talk in terms of virus particles; that's how they refer uh to to viruses. Epidemiologists they talk in terms of virus particles, so I don't think viruses are conscious or have their own conscious point of view, but I think archaea do, but bacteria do, an amoeba, paramecium does. Yeah.
Interesting. Science often asks the following question: How does the brain generate consciousness? Should we not instead ask: How does consciousness or mind generate the brain? So putting it in a larger context, what is the relationship between mind and matter? How and for what purpose does mind generate matter, and what is matter for that matter? From the point of view of analytic idealism, um before the enlightenment, um most of the world's um thought traditions, philosophical traditions, took it for granted that it is mind that creates the nervous system, creates its body. Um, the assumption that the correlation is explained by inverting this this causality arrow, by saying that it's the brain that creates the mind, it's in in in the given the scope of cultural history, it's a fairly recent uh assumption, and it's already being undone. Um, most mature um and and and and intelligent neuroscientists today would stay away from uh either uh direction in the era of causality; they would not say the brain creates the mind or the mind creates the brain; they would say the two are correlated, and that's an empirical fact, and what we have to do is map out that correlation, because that's what has practical applications; that's how you can design better neuroactive drugs; that's how you can improve neurosurgery; that's how you devise new treatments, is by understanding the correlation between the two. Now correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but it often does, and there are three hypotheses here: one is the brain creates the mind; nobody could ever explain how this could happen, not even in principle. Um, the mind creates the brain, or the mind and the brain are both created by a third thing. In all three cases you have the correlation, right? Under analytic idealism, you don't even come to this question; it's not like there is a deliberate creation by one party of the other party; one is just what did the other looks like. The brain is simply what mental activity looks like when observed from the outside. So you don't even get to, "Oh, then mental activity creates the brain." Well, in a sense, yes, but it's not deliberate; it's not an act of creation; it's a spontaneous thing. The brain is what mental processes look like; it's the appearance of it. It's like asking, "Does combustion create flames?" Well, flames are what combustion looks like, right? Uh, it it's much more immediate and spontaneous than this talk of creation. So uh under analytical idealism, the brain is simply what the mind looks like, and all empirical evidence is consistent with it. You mess up with the brain; that's the appearance of a mental process, messing up with another mental process. Now on the dashboard, it looks like a scalpel cutting into a brain, or you taking a pill that messes up with your conscious inner life, like an antidepressant or a psychedelic. All these material processes are the appearances of causal mental chains from mind to mind, because mind is all that exists under analytic idealism.
What is matter according to analytic idealism? Because I mean, if you take physics these days also, matter is something different than what I learned as matter—the little balls, you know, electrons and stuff like that—at school. That's over a century outdated. Yeah, thank you. We still teach it at school, right? Yeah. Under analytic analytic idealism, matter is always, in all cases, without exception, without a single exception, matter is always what mind looks like. The variety of matter represents the appearance of the variety of mental states and mental dynamics. So the brain is what your mental inner life looks like. Um, the inanimate universe is what the mental inner life of Mind At Large looks like. Matter is always what mental states look like under analytic idealism. Now does the physicist need to believe it? Not really. The physicist works in the realm of appearances, because that's what we can observe empirically. Now we are pilots that were born in an airplane dashboard, in an in an airplane cockpit without windows, only with a dashboard. We have always only flown by instruments, which is possible; you know, a pilot can fly by instruments alone; they don't need a transparent window to see what's going on; the dashboard is enough. So we were born in that cockpit without windows; all we have ever had was a dashboard. So we take the dashboard for the sky; it's an understandable mistake; it is a mistake, but it's a forgivable one. All we have had was a dashboard, so we mistake reality for the dashboard; we think the dashboard is the sky; is the reality outside. That's the dilemma of the physicist. The physicist only has the dashboard, in other words, the material or physical universe, and they find correlations between the movement of the dials in the dashboard: one dial goes this way, another goes that way, and the physicist will say, "Well, this dial movement caused the other dial movement." No, both movements were caused by a mental state behind, outside the airplane, behind the dashboard, but it works as though one dial caused the other, and we can create all of our physical theories that way by pretending that causality is a dashboard thing. It's okay so long as you don't start arriving at metaphysical conclusions because of that, of course. Analytic idealism is not a scientific theory, right? It's a philosophy. Correct. But nevertheless, it appears that it sort of bypasses the question because it goes to, in terms of the process, how mind generates matter, because all it says that matter is the appearance, but how it how do appearances arise? Yeah, how it arises; it seems to sort of bypass that question, right?
No, no. It's about dissociation. Appearances arise when there is a boundary between the observer and the observed. If they are not distinct, there are no appearances, because appearances are what something looks like from the outside. For there to be an outside, there has to be a division, a boundary between the inside and the outside. So the observer looks from the outside, and the observed exists in the inside, right? So how do appearances arise? When this boundary arises; when there can be one mind on one side of the boundary or one segment of a mind on one side of the boundary and another segment of a mind on the other side of the boundary. Now we have one observing the other from the outside, the outside being determined by that boundary. That boundary is a dissociative boundary, which is how uh um mental contents can split up seemingly from one another, is through dissociation. That's a condition; you know, in psychiatry we know it happens in mental space. Analytic idealism simply extrapolates that to the to the whole of nature, because the whole of nature is mental under analytic idealism. So why are there appearances? Well, because there is dissociation. I am dissociated from you by two dissociative boundaries—yours, the one that separates you from the world around you, and mine, the one that separates me from the world around me. So if I would like to observe your thoughts, imagine that your skull were transparent, or that the neurosurgeon came here and cracked your skull open and did it like this, so I could so I could see your your your your brain and you know, its brain activity, I would be observing it from the outside, because there are two dissociative boundaries between me and your thoughts, and therefore your thoughts will appear to me as a brain and brain activity. But from your own point of view, your thoughts appear to you as as thoughts, as ideas, emotions, intuitions, fantasies, perceptions—all kinds of mental qualities. To me they will appear as contents of perception, in other words, representations on my dashboard. Dashboards only exist because we can separate the airplane from the sky; there's an airplane skin, an aluminum skin, that allows us to say there is an outside from the perspective of the pilot. Uh, the same thing from matter. Matter is how mental states appear to an observer on the outside, that outside being determined by a dissociative boundary. So once you have a dissociative boundary, matter appears spontaneously; it's simply how one thing looks like to another from across a dissociative boundary. And between you and a table there is only one boundary, right? There's only one boundary—my own. Yeah, because the table is inanimate, basically. Yeah. Okay, thank you.
Here's a question regarding the role of evolution from our viewer with the nickname Taumi: I quote, "I'm open to this theory—he or she means that consciousness is primary to matter—and I recognize the profundity it suggests, but you are speaking as if the millions of years of evolution from the beginning of organic life didn't happen. If consciousness created matter, it was only able to create the basic ingredients and set in motion the long slow process of evolution. As brilliant as scientists are, it's not clear to me that they're taking this into account." End quote. And it appears that the comment refers to our interview as scientists. So there is a bit of of course assumption in this comment that consciousness created matter as basic ingredients; that's one thing. So instead, perhaps matter became conscious after reaching a certain minimal level of complexity through evolution. What do you think about it? This is dualistic thinking; she's talking in terms of mind and matter, one having created the other as a separate domain. Um, we don't need to get so complicated. Um, we don't need to get so inflationary. There is only mind. What we call matter is a mental impression; you know, if I hold this glass and feel solidity and weight, these are mental qualities. So solidity and weight are qualities in my conscious states. Um, what we call matter is simply a specific type of mental state, which are perceptual states—the things we see here, touch, smell and taste. Um, so there is no mind creating matter as a separate domain at a certain point in history. No, there has ever only been mind, and matter is what mind looks like from across the dissociative boundary. That dissociative boundary is life. And why did life arise? Well, because it could arise, and given enough time, whatever can happen does happen. Um, so life arose; in other words, a dissociative boundary arose at that moment automatically; matter arose because matter is what the outside looks like to the inside of a dissociative boundary; it's simply the appearance; it's not an act of creation; it's not like mind conjured up an idea and thought, "Now there shall be matter." No, it—mind dissociated. When it dissociates, some of its mental contents correspond to representations of what's happening on the other side of the dissociative boundary. It's it's a very naturalist, spontaneous um dynamic. Um, evolution by natural selection is the account of the history of that dissociation. So in other words, I'm not contradicting evolution by natural selection; on the contrary, I think clearly evolution by natural selection happened. Whether it's enough to explain everything starting from random mutations, I doubt that, but that it happens, it clearly happens. So one very simple alter at some point in the primordial past dissociated—four billion years ago on this planet—and probably that dissociation, initial dissociation happened a number of times until there was an alter that could create other alters, and we are the descendants of that, because the ones that couldn't create other alters are gone, right? And then that alter that could create other alters, at some point these alters started getting better at remaining alive for longer, remaining dissociated for longer. Did they want to do that? Well, maybe not, but it's the ones that did that that stayed around; the ones that tried to survive that stayed around; the ones that didn't care are not around; we are not their descendants; we are the descendants of the ones who tried to survive for longer and better, and therefore the the the mental structure of that alter started changing, becoming more sophisticated and conducive to maintaining the dissociation and producing more dissociative alters from themselves, in other words, reproducing. Um, and we call that the evolution of life, the way these new configurations of mentation that maintain the dissociation, the way they looked like was arms and legs, um um venom in the case of snakes to to deter uh predators, the entire morphology, the phenotypes of all these incredible links in the chain of evolution that eventually led to us—all of this is a natural spontaneous mental dynamics that we describe in terms of physical dynamics, because again, we are airplane pilots born in a cockpit without windows; all we have is a dashboard, so we talk dashboard; it's our language to explain the world, but all of this is a spontaneous mental process; it's it's very tempting for people uh to this day to think in dualistic terms. This started with the cart in the 16th century, and we are still doing it because it has become so ingrained. So a lot of people ask me, "Oh, Bernardo, you think always his mind, right? What if I stick a needle in your arm?" It's a very physical process, a very physical cause which creates a mental effect—pain—and you pull your arm away. So clearly the arrow of causation is physical to mental. That's dualistic thinking. There is no physical; physical is a mental appearance of mental processes. Uh, what happened when you stuck the needle in my arm is that a mental process outside my alter intervened on my alter through its dissociative boundary, and what that looks like is a needle piercing my skin; it's a mental process that appears to observation as a needle piercing a skin, and that mental process has a mental effect—pain. So there is no dualism required here, because everything we refer to as physicality is a content of perception, even the output of instrumentation—telescopes, oscilloscopes, microscopes—even that output needs to be perceived for us to be able to do something about it. So everything we call physical is just a certain type of mental state which happen to represent other mental states. There is no need for dualism here.
I'm thinking out loud. So the difference between, in terms of consciousness, the difference between bacteria and me, because both we both conscious, right? But I have sort of metacognition, so it's it's qualitatively, I guess, a different level of consciousness, and that requires a degree of complexity of the organism, right, to to arrive at that, or not? And that's where evolution plays a role. Am I correct? That requires a degree of complexity of your mental dynamics, which will appear to observation from the outside as the complexity of the organism, but the biology, the organism, is what that mental structure looks like. And of course, the alters that survived were the ones that developed a complex, sophisticated inner mental structure that allow them to live longer and reproduce better and gain control of their environment, and we are the descendants of those, because they are the ones that passed on their structure; the ones that were not as good no have fallen by the ways side. So we acknowledge basically that evolution as a mechanism by natural selection—evolution by natural selection exists; it works; it's part of the—there's overwhelming evidence that it that it exists and works. What there is no clear evidence for is that it is sufficient to account for the variety of life uh today. We we like to think neo-Darwinians like to think, although there is evidence to the contrary already, that at the root of evolution by natural selection, the mutations themselves are random. Natural selection is of course not random; it's biased towards fitness; that's the whole point, but the mutations themselves are supposed to be unbiased and random. It is not clear that that's the case, because one, it cannot be proven; we don't have a complete enough set of all the mutations that have happened in the history of life on this planet, including the mutations that were not fixed in the genomes to run a randomness test and check if they're really not biased. We cannot; we we simply do not know that. When we say that something is random, we are basically saying we don't know what causes it; that's all we are saying; we don't know what the regularities are; therefore we call it random; it's an epistemic concept. Um, it could be that the mutations themselves are biased in some way, ways that we don't understand; there is new evidence for it; there is a there was a study done a few years ago, I think by some Israelis, that have shown that um mutations in the part of the DNA that have a bearing on the immune response against malaria—the part of your genes that control your immune response against malaria—mutations in that part of your genetic code happen much more frequently in countries where malaria is present; in countries where malaria is not present, like the cold North, uh the mutations in that part of the gene happen less. Now that that's a clear bias in the mutations themselves that we don't understand yet. So but having made this disclaimer that evolution by natural selection, whether the mutations are random or not, that natural selection happens; there's overwhelming evidence for it.
We do not have perceptual access to the world as it is in itself, right? Right. We only have access to what the world looks like to us. Now Kant already said that at the end of the 18th century: We only have access to the phenomena, to the appearances; we don't have access to the noumena, the things in themselves. Um, so it's in that spirit that I said we only have access to the dashboard, because we don't have transparent windows to see the world as it is. But Chenhow came around a few years after Kant, um in the early 19th century, and he proposed an idea that was incredibly compelling; he said was largely right, but not completely right, because there is one part of the noumena that we can access directly, and that's us. We too are part of nature; we too actually exist; we too are noumena, not mere representations in the minds of other people. Even if everybody else disappeared and we were the only living being alive on this universe, there would still be something it is like to be us. We are not limited to the representations of other people—the representations of us; there is something it is like to be us. We are noumena too. So in our case, we do have direct access to the noumena; we don't have that access to the noumena of anything else, but in our case we do. And if we introspect, we find what it is like to be the noumena, and what do we find? We find thoughts, emotions, fantasies, intuitions, perceptions. So can we extrapolate from what it is like to be us, which is a direct access to the thing in itself, to what it is like to be a star? What it is like to be a black hole? I find that very difficult. I think we can extrapolate what it is like to be another person; I think I can extrapolate what it is like to be my cat; um, maybe I can even extrapolate what it is like to be an amoeba, but I can't extrapolate what it is like to be a black hole, what it is like to be a star, what it is like to be a moon. Um, or which is the correct question: What it is like to be the inanimate universe as a whole? There may be nothing it's like to be a star in and of itself or a moon in and of in and of itself; there may only be something it is like to be all stars, all moons, the entire inanimate universe as a whole, just as there is only something it is like to be my entire nervous system and not a single neuron in my head, right? Um, I find it very difficult to extrapolate to the noumena of Mind At Large. Some people think they can do that through forms of meditation and introspection, which which is plausible; there may be ways to reduce the strength of our dissociative boundary, to make the dissociative boundary more po more permeable, such that you can reach out beyond your own dissociative boundary and get a direct glimpse of your own cognitive surroundings, which appear to you as the physical world around you. So it is conceivable that one can access some small segments of Mind At Large, the part that is in our immediate mental neighborhood. Um, I have never managed to do that, so I can't attest to the possibility, but I think it is coherent; it's it's plausible. Yeah. But the whole formulation of "objective reality out there," are you comfortable with that? Absolutely. Uh, and and it doesn't contradict uh the notion that reality is mental. Let me give you an example: I have thoughts right now, subjective here; are my subjective thoughts. From your perspective, they are objective, because my thoughts would still be here even if you're not there. My thoughts don't depend on your presence or or even existence to exist. You cannot change my thoughts merely by imagining them to be different or wishing them to be different. My thoughts do what they do regardless of what your thoughts are doing inside your head, right? So although my my thoughts are intrinsically subjective, from your perspective they are entirely objective, even if you're not there; my thoughts would still be here doing whatever it it is that they do in exactly the same way. Mind At Large is intrinsically subjective; it has mental states that are experienced by itself, but from our perspective Mind At Large is completely objective, just as my thoughts are objective from your perspective. So I'm comfortable saying there is an objective world, as long as we understand that as perspectival objectivity; it's an objective world from our perspective, but from its own perspective the world around us is subjective; it is intrinsically or essentially subjective.
Is Mind At Large or Consciousness with a large C the same as God? Does the Divine exist in your view? If so, what is it? Is reality fundamentally pantheistic or panentheistic? And maybe you could explain the difference for viewers who are not uh philosophically inclined. Thank you. So what my friend uh Bernard Carr calls Consciousness with Big C would would not be just Mind At Large; it would be Universal Consciousness; in other words, Mind At Large plus all alters plus the minds of all living beings—all of that is one thing. The the boundaries, the divisions are are merely um circumstantial. A person who undergoes dissociation doesn't fundamentally become two or more minds; it's just that there is an appearance of distinct centers of awareness, but it's still only one mind. So that one mind in nature is Universal Consciousness, which undergoes dissociation to form these little alters we call living organisms, and what remains outside those little alters is what we call Mind At Large. So Consciousness with with Big C would be Mind At Large plus all alters; in other words, Universal Consciousness. Um, it depends on what one means by God, right? There are probably 8 billion different definitions of God on this planet alone, because there are 8 billion people. Um, if we go with the Western tradition, um there are two main parts of the definition of God in in the western religious tradition, the Christian religious tradition. One part says God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, meaning it's everywhere; it uh it it it knows everything, uh and it can do anything. The other part is that it's personal, in the sense that it's similar to us, because God is supposed to have created us in its own image. So if we have personal minds, in the sense that we can deliberate, uh that we that we have explicit goals, that we intervene with things
In terms of universal Consciousness, therefore, Universal Consciousness is all you need. It's all there is, and therefore it's omnipresent by definition. If it's all there is, then it's omnipresent, right? Um, it is a mind, so it it is it is. Cent in from the the OM cant om being meaning everywhere, and cent means knowing. Um, it's a mind, and whatever happens happens in it, so it knows all. It may be dissociated. What it knows through me is not accessible to what it knows through you, but you and I are it. So from its dissociated perspective, it knows everything there is to know, even though we, as segments, don't know everything there is to know. But whatever we know, it knows, because we are part of it. In that sense, it is omniscient.
And is it omnipotent then? Well, whatever happens in nature, since nature is universal Consciousness, happens because the mind of nature does it. It's all there is, so in that sense, it is omnipotent. So if this part of the definition of God is sufficient for us to use the word, the word God, then you could say, under analytic idealism, there is perforce a God, because there is perforce this mind that is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Where you would fall short is whether it's a deliberating, personal-like mind with its own goals and its own manipulative strategies. Well, that analytic idealism doesn't say, and and I personally, I I don't think empirically speaking that that's the case. I think the only justification to entertain this thought of God as a personal mind has necessarily to come from some form of religious experience, introspection, meditative insight. I don't p-poos, I I I am not able of having those myself, but I don't p-poos I believe that some people have religious insights that lead them to think of God as a deliberating agent, and they may be right, but analytic idealism cannot in and of itself substantiate that leap.
Do you believe in God? Yeah, of course, as an anal analytic idealist, you personally, I mean you personally, apart from the—I believe that there is a mind that is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, and by the way, it's the only thing that exists, and it's you, and it's me, and it's the cat, and it's the amoeba, and it's the moons and the black holes and the stars, the whole shebang. So Divinity exists in your view? Yeah. How we experience it, we may experience it differently, each of us, but it it does exist in your—of course, we are it. Yeah. You know, Christian language, the Holy Spirit has descended into every man, woman, and child. Yeah, just to maybe just to to frame it a bit, is reality fundamentally pantheistic or panentheistic?
So pantheism would say the physical universe is God, in the Spinoza sense. In other words, it is what God looks like. Spinoza never meant that God is material substance. There is a letter Spinoza wrote to his friend Henry Oldenburg in which he clarifies this, because people read the *Tractatus Politicus Philosophicus*, uh, in which he talked about his view of God, saying God is nature, and people thought, so you mean that God is this material mass around us, and Spinoza was horrified because that's not what he meant. And in his letter to Oldenburg, uh, it's very clear he says, um, God is not this mass, uh, God is imminent in the mass. In other words, the mass is the appearance of God, but God itself is mental substance, not material substance. So having made the disclaimer, pantheism is the notion that the physical universe is the appearance of God, and the appearance is complete, meaning there is nothing about God that you cannot find back in the appearance, in the physical universe; that there's nothing about God beyond what you can discern in the physical universe. That means, under pantheism, that God is imminent; it is that which projects the image we call the universe, but it is not transcendent in the sense that there is nothing about it that you don't see in its image. That's pantheism. Panentheism is that God is imminent; there is nothing to the universe but God projecting that image, but there is more to God than you can see in the image. So God, under pan-anism, is both imminent and therefore accessible and transcendent. There are segments of God that we cannot reach through the images. God goes beyond the physical universe. You can't find out everything there is to know about it just by contemplating the entire physical universe. There are there is something about God that does not project an image that is accessible to us.
I think panentheism is much more likely to be correct, because it would be supremely unlikely that we monkeys have evolved a perceptual system that picks up everything that is salient about the environment around us. Why would we evolve to do that? We evolved to pick out what is important for survival and reproduction. Whatever is is not important for survival and reproduction, we we wouldn't evolve to pick out; we wouldn't evolve to perceive it, and therefore it wouldn't be part of the physical universe, because the physical universe is what comes to us through perception. So I think it would be extraordinarily unlikely that the reality beyond us is entirely visible on the screen of perception, visible in the broad sense, perceptible. It's extraordinarily unlikely that that would be so, and and I don't I don't mean by this trivial things like we cannot see in the X-ray part of the of the spectrum. No, what I mean by it is is something that is incommensurable with the categories of perception, with vision, uh, audition, like time, space, for example, something something that may not even be commensurable with spacetime, indeed. Um, and I think God, if we want to use that word, is transcendent in that sense. U it is what it is; it's not choosing to hide itself; it's just that we as alters wouldn't have evolved to cognize everything there is to be cognized, to cognize everything that is philosophically salient. We cognize only what is salient from the point of view of survival, because that's what evolution does, right? So from this perspective, I think it's almost certain that panentheism is right, because evolution by natural selection simply wouldn't do what pantheism requires it to do, which is to pick out everything that is philosophically salient. Why why why on Earth would that happen? Why would monkeys be able to see all there is to see? Right? It's incredibly unlikely.
And what does analytic idealism say about this, this—how do you position there? Analytic idealism is in principle neutral about making a statement which one is correct, uh, but if you follow analytic idealism, um, you would you would understand that it's unlikely that representations, appearances, perception would tell the entire story. Why why would it be the case? Now it's it's suppose that no living creature could see; all they had was um sense of smell, perceiving the chemicals around, sense of touch—no bacteria like this. Bacteria don't hear or see; they only have the sense of smell, taste stuff. So when at a time on this planet when there were only bacteria, bacteria couldn't see; therefore the world beyond the reach of molecules drifting around and being picked up by contact, because the um smell, taste, and touch operate by contact. Molecules need to reach your your your your your tongue or the inner lining of your nose for you to have a sense of taste and smell. So anything that is beyond the physical reach of drift molecules would be transcendent. In other words, anything 10 meters away is transcendent for bacteria. If nobody could see, the world beyond 10 meters is entirely transcendent, right? So why do we think that we've reached that completion? Why do we think that we are not in some way akin to those bacteria, that there are kazillion of senses that we didn't evolve because we don't we didn't need to? You and yet, that doesn't change what is actually out there and was out there from the beginning. We just didn't evolve to pick it out, and what we don't pick out is by definition transcendent.
Here's a question from Luke de Pre: I quote, "Dr. Castr makes the claim of Consciousness as a reality's foundational driver, only he did not have the tools of obstruction to properly define Consciousness itself," end quote. So what is consciousness? Can we properly define it? Analytic philosophy has done this ad nauseam already for for decades. Um, we have different definitions of consciousness. When I say consciousness, what I mean by it is phenomenal consciousness, uh, which is well understood in analytic philosophy. Phenomenal consciousness is the capacity for experience. If there is experience, there is phenomenal consciousness. There are other qualifiers; you can talk about access consciousness, but let's not talk about that because it's something else that is meant by it. What I mean by consciousness is phenomenal consciousness, and what is it? Is that which experiences; it is the the substrate, the potential for experience. When consciousness gets excited, you have experience. Consciousness is that whose excitations are experiences. If there is something it is like to be an entity, that entity is conscious in the phenomenal sense. This definition does not require higher-level mental functions like uh the ability to introspect, to self-reflect, to re-represent, or meta-cognize. It doesn't require any of that; it only requires raw experience. If there is experience, there is consciousness, because experience is an excitation of consciousness, and consciousness in the phenomenal subject, in the phenomenal sense, is the subject itself. The subject of your experiences is your consciousness; it is the excitations of the subject that are the experiences. When you perceive the world, it is you as a subject being excited by the world across your dissociative boundary, leading to the internal experiential state you call perception. In other words, you call it the world. The world is actually an internal representation of your consciousness, of your subjectivity, which is correlated with the actual world out there, as it should, otherwise perception wouldn't be useful, uh, but all of your experiences are excitations of the subject that you call yourself, and that subject is what we mean by phenomenal consciousness. If there is experience, there is phenomenal consciousness.
And consciousness, as it was explained between uh or by by um Bernard Carr, like consciousness with a big C and consciousness with a small c, um, how would you position that in the context of analytic idealism? Do you agree with that? Absolutely. Um, I I think there is only consciousness with Big C. Uh, consciousness with small c is a configuration of consciousness with Big C. In other words, it's not a separate entity; it's not a thing unto itself; it's a segment, a configuration, a dis—like me and you in this case. Yeah, me and you are dissociative local configurations of consciousness with Big C. The subject that looks to the world from behind my eyes is exactly the same subject that looks to the world from behind your eyes, from behind the eyes of my cat, from behind the membrane of the amoeba. Um, we talk about consciousness with small c because we know that we can't read each other's thoughts, and we don't know what's happening in the galaxy of Andromeda right now, so we are limited. Well, you can account for that limitation through a dissociative process within consciousness with big C, and therefore consciousnesses with small c are appearances; they are illusions; they are cognitive configurations that appear to lead to a sort of a a particular center of awareness, um, that cannot access each other's thoughts or what's happening in the galaxy of Andromeda, because there is a dissociative boundary in between. But you know, people also have dissociative identity disorder, and uh there can be many personalities within a person with dissociative identity disorder, with different ages, different genders, different memories, um, and they all think that they are their own thing. Well, when this person gets cured, the person realizes, oh, they were all me. When you dream at night, you're dissociated; you think you're your dream avatar and not the rest of the dream. When you wake up, you realize, oh, it was all me. Uh, when we die, we realize, oh, it was all me, right? So there is no true consciousness with small c; they are just dissociated configurations of consciousness with Big C. There is only one subject in nature; it is the subject that looks out to the world from behind everybody's eyes, and we just have these internal narratives of identity that are different. You think of yourself as this person who was born in that year in a country that no longer exists, and I think I am this person who was born on that other year in a far away tropical land, that sometimes I think, did I dream that I was born there, you know? Um, these are etal narratives; these are contents of consciousness; they are not consciousness itself. Um, there is only one phenomenal consciousness, and if you postulate that there is more than one, you run into all kinds of insoluble problems. If there would be fundamentally different consciousnesses, they couldn't interact with one another because they're fundamentally distinct. You run into all kinds of issues, all kinds of inner contradictions and incoherences. So now the only way to make sense coherently of nature is to say there is only one field of subjectivity, and it's that which is looking out from behind everybody's eyes. Yeah, and in if in the constellation of Andromeda, for example, there was a conscious life of any life actually or other type of alien life, it would still be the same subject through this. Yeah. You you can't see the aliens from the galaxy of Andromeda in the same way that you can see what the Chinese is looking at right now, so it doesn't matter; it's from the point of view of this fundamental subjectivity; there is no space and time. Space and time are cognitive categories that we invent to organize the information we get about the world. Space and time are our own cognitive filing cabinet, so to say, to prevent cognitive overload. Um, distances mean nothing from the point of view of the fundamental layer of reality.
Darcy Brega, from a tropical country far away from Brazil, wants to test a hypothesis with you: I quote, "Could analytic idealism explain the phenomena like ghosts, entities, diamonds, UFOs, and all the so-called anomalous experiences through increased porosity at the border of the alter and exchange of information between the interior and exterior of phenomenal consciousness?" End quote. So what do you think about it? And generally speaking, does analytic idealism offer a plausible explanation for such phenomena? Not directly; it will not offer a positive reason for us to believe in these phenomena, um, but it does open the space for them to be possibly true, um, in the sense that under analytic idealism it's not incoherent to think that telepathy can happen, because dissociation, like any process in nature, is bound to not be perfect. We evolved to be dissociated, and we evolved to think that we are this bag of skin here and not what's happening out there, because if we don't think that, we don't bother to run away from the tiger. So the ones that didn't have this hallucination that they are this existing side, the bag of skin, they are gone; we are not their descendants; the tiger caught them. We are the the descendants of the one who the ones who hallucinated that they really exist only here, and and therefore they better stay alive. Um, therefore dissociation is so strong, but nothing in nature is perfect, right? When you create a campfire, you don't burn everything that is combustible; nothing in nature is perfect. So dissociation will not be so—under analytic idealism, it's conceivable, even plausible, that under extraordinary circumstances, such as emotional upheaval, you could have telepathy going on between people who are effectively very connected to one another. I've seen it happen to somebody very close to me, and I don't doubt that it happens. I go as far as to say it is common; we just don't meta-cognize it; we don't pay attention to it. Um, now regarding the rest, you know, the person listed a whole list of anomalous anomalous phenomena, and each one would require a specific treatment, but in general terms, um, under analytic idealism the dissociation is not perfect, so yes, there could be traffic across the dissociative boundary, um, under exceptional conditions, and we would not know what to make of it, because we evolved biologically and culturally to interpret what comes to us by our our five senses. Uh, what comes to us directly straight across the dissociative boundary, um, is bound to not have a readily available interpretation, to be made sense of, and therefore people will come up with new language for it: UAPs, uh, aliens, well, ghosts, whatever. So analytic idealism does offer a perspective to to try to account for that if those things actually happen, but analytic idealism does not predict that they should happen; it only opens the door for for for these things to to have a natural, a naturalist explanation. So his hypothesis is correct, you would say, more or less—to not to generalize too much, but it roughly, yes, yes. The direction is fine; yeah, it's not a hopeless direction. No. Okay, you should be; you should be happy.
A question from John Peterson on how to understand birth and death absent of time and space: I quote, "How should we understand the process of dissociated alter, human consciousness forming and dissolving if time and space are not fundamental? I can't get around this process being a doing, as being a doing, and I can't understand how a doing can occur outside of time. How can anything happen without time?" End quote. Your thoughts? Yeah, so that that that has to do with uh the degree of concession we make during discourse. Um, in normal discourse, we have to presuppose the existence of time and space, because that's built into language. Language has tenses; that's time. Language has a division between subject and object; that's space. Um, logic, even the very law of causation, requires time. So in most of my discourse, I make a concession and and and assume, although I know it's wrong, that time and space are real, um, because that's the only way to communicate in a in a manner that people will understand. That's why I talk about a doing of nature as opposed to an entity. Now, in reality, we have every reason to think that time and space exist only in here. We create time and space as a sort of a filing system for information about the world. Even physics, with loop quantum gravity, is is going in the direction of thinking of of time as not fundamental, as an emergent property of more fundamental structures in reality. How do we think about this then, in reality as it is in itself? Now, I call reality as it is in itself the crystal of Eternity. It's a structure, but it's not a structure that requires time or space, because it is a cognitive structure; it's a structure made of links of meaning, and links of meaning do not require space or time; do not require extension. They're links of meaning: one meaning leading to another meaning, pointing to another meaning, which points you get again to another meaning. So you get a web or a crystal structure of these meaning associations; that's what reality is. Now, how do we bridge the crystal of Eternity with events? Alan Watts had a wonderful metaphor for this: he said, imagine that you you don't know anything about life, and you are sitting in front of a wooden fence, and that fence has this wooden uh planks uh glued to to one another, so you can't see through it, except that right in front of you there is a slit; the planks were not nailed very close together, so you can see on the other side of the fence through that slit, and you don't know anything about life; you're sitting there looking at this slit, and then there comes a cat walking on the other side of the fence. So first you see the cat's head, then a moment later you see the cat's tail, and the cat passes by, turns around, it comes again, and again you see the head and then the tail, and every time the cat walks along you see the head and the tail. What do you do? You say the head causes the tail, which is what we do, because we we are traversing the crystal of Eternity through this slit that we call spacetime, and therefore we talk of causation, and we talk of events; we talk of things happening because this slit is traversing the crystal of Eternity. Outside the crystal of Eternity, things simply are. What we call the doing or the event of dissociation is like a shadow projected onto spacetime by something that is an intrinsic potentiality of what is—what is has the intrinsic potentiality of regarding itself from within, from a dissociated perspective; it has that intrinsic potentiality, and it also has the potentiality to be the whole thing at once. In time, we split those two potentialities; they cast a shadow that has a shape that you can say, oh, in this part of the shadow it's a dissociation; in this part of the shadow the dissociation is over. It's like saying that uh here there is the head and then here comes the tail, but there is only the cat, and dissociation is part of what the cat is. Dissociation is a shadow projected by the cat. It's very difficult to think this way, and so that's why I almost never do that; I always talk about dissociation being in an event, because it's a concession to cultural discourse.
Dr. Julia Mossbridge, during the interview with me, postulated that individual free will as such does not exist. Here's a comment from our viewer with a charming nickname, Only Truth Love: "Free will is like surfing; you do not control the waves that come your way, but you do control which wave to ride and how to ride it. Saying there is no free will negates almost everything that is valuable; love cannot exist without free will, neither can justice or virtue; all of those are logically contradicting to the idea of no free will," end quote. And by the way, Dr. Frederico Fajin also states in his book *Irreducible* that free will is essential. So where is the truth, and what is free will? It's just different definitions; what people mean by free will. What Federico means by free by free will is an intrinsic impetus to action. So there is only mind, um, and that mind has an intrinsic impetus to change its own state. Because of that, things happen; otherwise the universe would be entirely static. So you need what Federico defines as free will, the impetus to action, for anything to happen, and clearly there is an impetus to action, so there is free will in the sense that Federico talks about it; it's doubtlessly so. Other people define free will implicitly differently. Some people think of free will as libertarian free will, and what that means is whatever I do, I could have done otherwise. That is probably incoherent. Even though you did make a choice, you made the only choice you could make, because you are who you were; you were who you were; your choice is determined by that which you are. You do make that choice; in that sense, you have free will in the sense that you have agency. I can make a choice, but your choice is determined by that which you are, and you can't be other than what you are, and therefore there is no could have been. So yes, we all make choices, but that may not be libertarian in the sense that we like to think that we could have made other choices. Maybe no, maybe we couldn't; maybe the environment would have allowed you to make other choices, but you were who you were, and by being who you were, you had to make the choice you made. There is no could have been. You see, it's like if it could have been different, it would have been different, right? Correct. Correct. And and this does not deny meaning, because U I had this conversation with Hans some time ago; it is on the website, on the on the channel of Asa Foundation. Um, nobody in the universe can possibly know what choices you're going to make; not you, not God, nothing, because the universe is computationally irreducible. The only way to know exactly what the choices are going to be is to let the universe play itself out until the choice is actually made. There is no shortcut; there is no shorter computational way to predict what the choice is going to be. God, God itself cannot anticipate what we are going to choose, what it is going to choose. Um, so the meaning resides in self-discovery. Every choice is a moment of self-discovery: oh, I am the agent who makes a choice like this, given these circumstances. That's the meaning of life; it's a journey of discovery; it's nature discovering for itself what it is, because it's only in discovering what it does that it figures out what it is, just like a human being. You only know who somebody is when you observe what that person does, right? If the person is just sitting doing nothing, you don't know who that person is. Same for nature, same same for the for existence; it only figures out what it is by allowing itself to play out and discovering what it does. Therein resides all the meaning you can possibly need in your life. You are in a journey of discovery, more exciting than anything that the most leading-edge scientific laboratory on this planet could dream of, no matter what experiences, no matter what you experience, because every experience, every choice, good or bad, is a moment of self-discovery. That doesn't preclude morals; we can learn from what we already learned from previous choices and from each other's previous choices, because at the end of the day we are only one subject, so we should learn from what we have done; we should learn from what our brothers and sisters have done during the Second World War; we should learn from it and make more informed choices, because even though the choices are determined by that which we are, what we are learns and can influence what we'll do next, because what will be next is co-defined by what we have seen before, what we've learned before. So that choice will still be determined, but learning is intrinsic to that unfolding of what is, and therefore moral too. Um, therefore, I deterministically tell people that morals are important, and they should make choices based on the principle of empathy and the Golden Rule: thou shalt not do to anybody else what you don't want done to yourself. Um, and my saying that, deterministic as it is, is an input to the to the deterministic processes of other people's minds, right? So I still have to say that, just like one chip in a computer still has to send signals to another chip in the computer, so that the next chip has to do the right thing; otherwise the whole thing breaks down. It is deterministic, but everybody still has to play their role; that's what we are doing here today, um, and it does not empty meaning out of anything; it's the contrary. No regret is out of the table; there is no could have been, so stop killing yourself, you know, with regret; it it could not have been differently, and what was was a a learning; you discover you're discovering what you are, what life is, what the universe is, and there is much yet to be discovered. It's incredibly exciting, incredibly meaningful. We are the only metacognitive eyes through which nature can contemplate itself; there is no other game in town; it's us. We are the metacognitive eyes of nature, the moral eyes of nature; it's incredibly meaningful, and yet every choice we can make, and we do make choices, are determined by whatever it is that we are; can't be otherwise; otherwise it's the throw of a coin, but that's not free will either, because it's not will; it's random.
Why is analytic idealism considered to be a non-dual tradition? How does it differ from other non-dual philosophies of the East and West? I am not good—I don't know enough about the incredible incredible nuances and subtleties of Eastern philosophy; I'm not qualified to to speak about that. U I probably could say something, but I will not; I choose not to, because I don't want to misrepresent anything. The corpus of Eastern philosophy is enormous; it it's very difficult—unless you dedicate your life to that and to that alone, you probably shouldn't open your mouth about it, so I shall not open my mouth about it. Um, there is one other non-dual philosophy, um, in the West, and that's Schopenhauer's philosophy; that's entirely aligned with analytic idealism. It doesn't have the concept of outer formation, dissociation, how evolution by selection uh creates a dissociative boundary that amplifies external stimulus, all this other stuff; he didn't have it. Schopenhauer lived in a time where he couldn't have gone that far, but he went very far, and his philosophy is non-dual now. Why are both philosophies, analytic idealism and Schopenhauer's philosophy of the will, why are they both non-dual? Because they make no fundamental distinction between object and subject. Uh, um, they're both mental processes within one field of subjectivity. Is is that a dissociative boundary creates inner perspectives within that field? So whatever is outside a dissociative boundary looks like an object to a subject that is now surrounded by a dissociative boundary. So there is an appearance of object and subject, but fundamentally there is ever only the subject and its patterns of excitation and its and its um topologies, so to say. Thank you.
You postulated that AI, at least in its present form, cannot in principle become conscious. At the same time, you say that consciousness is fundamental and omnipresent, or this Universal Consciousness. The way we understand it, if we as carbon-based life forms have become conscious, can we really rule out the possibility that consciousness could emerge in other life forms, possibly even synthetic and technology-based? I could rule out the Spaghetti Monster. Maybe there is a Spaghetti Monster in a higher, invisible dimension that's moving the planets around the sun with its invisible noodly appendages. Goodness knows, the evidence is consistent with that; the planets do move around the sun, right? I can't rule out the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I can't rule out that there is a teapot in the orbit of Saturn right now. Maybe aliens came here in the 19th century, invaded an old woman's house, stole a teapot, took it along with them in their journey back home, got bored of it around when they were around Saturn, dumped it, and the teapot got caught in the gravity well of Saturn. I can't rule that out. So the important questions to ask is not what we can't rule out; we can't rule out an infinite amount of useless hypotheses that will take us nowhere. What is important to ask is what do we have good reasons to entertain seriously? What hypotheses do we have good reasons to entertain seriously? I do not think we have good reasons to seriously entertain the hypothesis that silicon computers have a private inner life of their own, not only because analytic idealism would say, well, the appearance of dissociation is metabolism; a silicon computer doesn't do any of the stuff that metabolism does, so we have no reason to think that it's a dissociated alter of universal consciousness, but also because IIT itself, integrated information theory, um, we can do very strict model U of how information flows within a silicon computer, and and realize that the F the amount of integrated information it leads to is negligible. Um, and what all of this suggests is that a silicon computer is not a thing, just like a glass is not a thing. Um, there is only the animated universe; we arbitrarily carve out boundaries in this big image that we call the inanimate universe, and we give names to the subsets of this image. It's like taking Van Gogh's um *Starry Night* and saying, let me pick out all the orange pigments, and I'll call it a thing, and I'll give it a name. Silly, right? But you can do that; you can do that. So that's what we do when we say this is a glass; we do it for convenience; it's useful to refer to this subset of pixels of the big the big image we call the inanimate universe as a glass, so we can talk about it and get one and drink water, but there is no glass; there is no table; there is no computer; there is only the inanimate universe as a whole. So how can we speak of whether a computer is conscious if there isn't even a computer? You know, the problem we run into here is linguistic; we take the structure of language for the structure of reality, which is—let me give you an example: we have a we have a word for fist. Is the fist a thing? Where is the fist? The fist has disappeared; it should have caused a nuclear explosion, right? The release of energy of an entity this size disappearing, we we should all be dead right now. Now, why are we why why aren't we dead? It's because there is no bloody fist; we mistake the structure of language for the structure of reality. This is another fist; the computer is a fist. So before we ask, can computers be conscious, we should ask, are computers a thing, or are they fists? I sub I submit to you computers are fists; it's not there, just like there is no river in the ocean. Tell me where the river ends and the ocean begins. These are all things we carve out based on convenience, and we give names to, and then we get food by this process, and we think that our names are things just because we have a name for it, like a fist; it's a thing; it's not a thing. So the finally the answer is we have no good reason whatsoever to think of a computer as having a private conscious in a life of its own. Can I rule it out? No. Okay. But are there any conditions under which you could envisage AI becoming conscious? Maybe merging with biology in some way. Then we would be conscious, and AI would be like putting glasses on. I just merged uh with my glasses. Now, the fact that you can do this merging under my skull is no different than putting my glasses on; it's still in contact with me. You see, whatever if it's in contact in here or in here, it's still in contact with me. Um, I do not rule out that may there may be artificial life created. We don't have it today. The best we have done today was to synthesize a DNA molecule, take a living cell, extract its DNA, put synthesized DNA in, give it a shock, and it continues to live and does what the new DNA tells it to do; that we have done, but we have never come from inanimate matter, put it together, give it a shock, and lo and behold, it is alive. Do I think that that can happen? Absolutely. I see absolutely no fundamental reason why it couldn't happen, and the moment we create artificial life, we will have created an artificial conscious being, but it will look like metabolism. Beyond that, may be forms of quantum computers that we don't even envisage today.
Is AI a threat or a blessing for humanity? Both. It depends on what we do with it. AI can liberate us from uncreative tasks; it can allow humans to reuse their creative outputs with incredibly high efficiency, um, but for it to be a net positive requires sober metaphysics and sober politics. Sober politics would be such that um the wealth, the efficiency created by AI, and therefore the wealth, has to be distributed amongst people. You cannot um take people's jobs because we found a more efficient way to do it and and and not give them anything. So enlightened an enlightened civilization would use AI to allow people to live philosophical, artistic lives; in other words, universal unconditioned universal basic income I think is is is is the only sane avenue forward. Everybody at the end of the month, unconditionally, unless you're a criminal, everybody unconditionally should get a minimum amount of money that allows them to survive with dignity, so they can have a a life of philosophy and art. Um, and on the metaphysical side, um, the great advantage is that AI will bring the metaphysics discussion about the nature of mind, the nature of reality, to make it mainstream in the for the first time in the history of humanity. It's not going to be something for academia, for for discussion amongst philosophers and scientists; it it will be under the umbrella AI; it will be a discussion across the entirety of society: what is mind? What is the nature of the self? What is the nature of reality? That's the advantage. The disadvantage is that because large language models speak like human beings, we may think therefore they are conscious, and therefore we are mechanisms, and that will take the dignity of human life out of the equation; that's a great danger; it's incredibly dangerous, especially because it's untrue. AI is not conscious; AI is an imitation of human speech because it has been trained on human writing; it's just recycling what humans did, so it looks human; of course it's recycling what humans did; it's not conscious; there is no reason to think of it of it as conscious or even creative, um, and therefore our dignity is intact because AI without us is nothing. AI is trained on human output; take human output away, and AI just just spits out squiggles, incoherent, senseless squiggles. AI is only powerful because it has
Confused? And then we spend huge amounts of money trying to reconcile that with physicalism—nonsense. Physical stuff are representations; are dashboard representations. If you don't measure, you don't get physical stuff. The dashboard shows nothing because what you're measuring is not physical. But for as long as you think all there is is physical, even yet physical stuff only appear after you measure. So what is it you're measuring? And people get all this combobulated, and all kinds of effort goes into pursuing rabbit holes, you know, dead ends. All of that would change under analytic idealism.
I think we would have a much more sound metaphysical foundation for doing science, and it would open doors of investigation and the possibility for funding for incredibly useful things that today are getting no attention. And world at large—I mean, mindset of people who are not necessarily scientists—world at large. What I mean, not only science. Okay. Now that, uh, it's the same subject behind everybody's eyes as the subject behind your eyes, that will immediately force you to treat people differently. Um, it will immediately force you to reconsider geopolitical moves that lead to incredible suffering because you can no longer detach yourself from other people.
The crisis of meaning would disappear. There is a crisis of meaning because we think we are mechanisms, and when we die, everything we learn at great cost during our lives was for nothing—to go back to dust. And it's for nothing, for no reason. But that disappears. Now you're dissociated—outter of a greater mind, whatever it is—you learn, the universe learns through you, and that will never go away; that will never disappear because it's not this little thing learning right now. This little thing is just a particular configuration through which the learning can be achieved, but the learning goes to the subject of nature, which is the sum total of everything. Life is intrinsically meaningful, whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you understand it or not. So the crisis of meaning—gone.
Uh, on the bad side, fear of death returns. We got rid of fear of death, um, in the middle of the 19th century because if consciousness is generated by the brain, and after you die the brain is not working, then there's nobody there to experience fear, to experience pain, to experience suffering of any kind. Your problems are guaranteed to come to an end at the moment of your death, whatever your problems are. And, by the way, you can speed that up. If life becomes unbearable, you push a button, and it's over. All your problems are over. Well, that's gone because now your consciousness is what there is; it has nowhere to go. Life and death is a configuration of consciousness; it's a state of consciousness. Death, therefore, represents the transition from this state of consciousness to a state we don't know—the great unknown of the experiential state after death—returns, and the anxiety associated with it returns. Everything changes.
Berard, thank you for addressing the open points and doubts of our viewers and readers. And to our audience, thank you for your comments and your questions. Uh, we do not always agree, but we love receiving them, so keep them coming. Thank you for watching. Thanks.