 If you live in the West, there's no doubt that you have the assumption that there is a physical world outside of your mind, that there's a world of experience and then there's a world of non-experience that kind of correlates to our experiences. Do we have to make this assumption? Is there any way that we could develop a consciousness-only ontology? Could everything just be fundamentally mental? There's no better person, probably in the entire world, to talk about the subject with than Dr. Bernardo Kastrup. He recently got his second PhD, this one in philosophy, writing a dissertation entitled, Analytic Idealism, A Consciousness Only Ontology. I saw it online and I read the dissertation, I saw his thesis defense, he's put it up there, and I thought, man, I gotta have him back on Patterson of Pursuit to talk about these ideas. Bernardo was back on the show in episode 78, Defending Idealism, but we go into quite a lot more detail in this conversation. It's not just a general overview. I actually end up asking him some of the hardest questions ever. Some of the hardest questions I've ever come across in philosophy just to see how he thinks about them. I found it incredibly stimulating and honestly, this might be my favorite recorded conversation that I've had with anybody. We just go so deep and asking them questions about what are concepts and what are the laws of physics and how do you explain this and that, and then we talk about the principle of parsimony and its appropriate role both in theorizing and metaphysics and methodology. I mean, it's just a killer conversation. And Bernardo was generous enough with his time that we ended up talking long enough to make two full, long interviews. So this week, we're talking about idealism and metaphysics, and the next week, here's talk about another incredibly important topic, which is logic, truth, rationality, and psychedelics. We focus a lot on both his experience of psychedelics, the theory of psychedelics, and whether or not some of the insights that people can gain in psychedelic states are trustworthy and reliable. Are there other ways of accessing knowledge other than the rational process? Bernardo has written several books on the subject of idealism. You can check out his work at BernardoCastrip.com. I'll have a link to his website and his recent dissertation and its defense online at steve-parish.com. Bernardo already has quite an impressive career. In addition to having two PhDs, he also used to work at CERN, and fun fact, he actually lives inside of a wormhole, at least according to Google. I say this because I have a particular pet peeve, which is lateness. It's terrible to be an American and have a pet peeve where you don't like when people are late. But I'm now two for two in talking with Bernardo and me being late. Why is this possible? It's because he lives in a wormhole for some reason. He's in some time zone in Europe, which does not show up correctly on Google. So after being late last time, I could triple check this time, and I thought, okay, there's no way I'm going to make that same mistake again. And I made the same mistake again. So I really do appreciate Bernardo's patience, both with me showing up late and with him talking for several hours with me. This was really a great pair of interviews. I know you guys will enjoy it. All right, Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, welcome back to Patterson Pursuit. It's great to see you again. Great to see you again, Steve. I want to start by congratulating you on getting your second PhD. I didn't realize this before when we had our first conversation because your philosophical level was so high, but your PhD was in computer science. That's right. Many years ago. Yeah, so I was surprised to see, I saw something online and you said, oh, I got my PhD in philosophy and I was thinking, wait a second, what? I thought you already had a PhD. You didn't even have one. Yeah, exactly. So I went and I watched your dissertation defense and very much enjoyed it. And I thought, okay, well, I'm actually going to read the dissertation. And because I really have been enjoying your work and I thought, oh, this is good. This is provoking so many thoughts. I got to have Dr. Casper back on the show. Really excited to talk with you. Great. Before we talk about the details of the argument, could you just give a little bit of your history with these ideas? I think most people, when they think of a philosopher building a pure idealistic theory, they're thinking, okay, this is probably somebody with a religious background and they've kind of had these general intuitions their whole life and then maybe they think, okay, I'm going to go into philosophy and try to defend what I already believe. Is that the story of Bernardo Casper? That's not my story at all. I'm afraid it would have been nice if I had that story in a way. Now, I started grappling with this. I think back when I was working at CERN, the accelerator, back in the mid-90s, I was in the team building what we called the Atlas Detector. I was responsible for the data acquisition part, together with a bunch of other people. And we were fooling around with neural networks back then. Ultimately, we didn't use them, but we fooled around enough with them. And that whole idea of, okay, I have a neural network now implemented in silicon in a processor or an FPGA. Why is this thing not conscious? Because it's a perfect, perfect. It's a fairly good emulation of what happens in my brain. And that's when I started thinking about that. And eventually, I learned about the so-called hard problem of consciousness, which hit me like a brick. It was like an epiphany. It made me realize the hopelessness of that line of thought that, I don't know, how can I imitate the brain well enough until some conscious spark just pops out of nowhere? That's a wrong line of thinking. You will never get qualities from something that is defined purely in terms of quantities. The physical world is defined in terms of quantities. And qualities, color, asphalt, belly pain, or the bitterness of disappointment, these are things that are supposed to be generated by your brain inside your skull and not to exist out there. But when you have a silicon circuit in front of you, that's just quantities. It's voltages, potentials, currents that will never generate qualities if you are philosophically strict. And that opened up this questioning my assumptions. Why am I assuming that there is this purely quantitative world out there somehow stimulating my sense organs and causing my brain to produce magically qualities? There is nothing about mass, charge, momentum, spin, spatial temporal position, in terms of which I could deduce the qualities of experience. It's an unbridgeable gap. And then I realized I'm starting with the assumption of an abstract physical world out there, and then I'm trying to reconstruct what I am given from birth, which is my experiential life. I'm trying to reconstruct that from an assumption. And that reconstruction is impossible. So what am I doing wrong? It's the assumption. It is the assumption that's going wrong. And then I went down the line of idealism because unlike you, I am... How do I put this in a way that doesn't completely shoot myself in the foot? I am predisposed, very much predisposed to parsimonious solutions. I like things that are small, clean, you know, no unnecessary edges. So I am a monist by... not only by reasoning, but by disposition. I have a very monist disposition. So for me, once I discarded the physical world as a problematic and unnecessary assumption, I fell into the given. The given is a mentality experience. Let's make sure we talk about parsimony specifically because I think you bring up some good points. We briefly talked about this before in our last discussion as well, but that plays a key role kind of in your method of evaluating potential theories on their merits. So would you say then that you started with kind of a default physicalist, metaphysical assumption of what the world was? And how strong was that? Were you somebody that was like hardcore, stereotypical, atheist, materialist? No, I was never a militant. No, but my early education, and my mother is a Catholic. My father was... he died many years ago. It was very much in that scientific paradigm, you know, empiricism, reasoning. So I got both of these things from very early on, that dualism and that implicit. My father was not really a physicalist. He was never committed to it, but it's an undercurrent that is there by default, if you know what I mean. And then I went to the university very early. I had just turned 17, and then my world was pure physicalism. Not because it was a reasoned, conscious, deliberate choice. I was a fish swimming in an ocean of physicalism. It was my world, and then I ended up in the world's HQ of physicalism, the Cathedral of Physicalism, which was CERN. In my very first job, I defended my thesis on a Friday. On Sunday I was on a plane. On Monday I started at CERN. So I was a physicalist by default, not by reasoning I was never a militant, not at all. It's just that I never re-evaluated the assumptions I was making until I did, and then I wasn't a physicalist anymore. So, if you could, could you give the nutshell argument that you lay out in your dissertation, and then we'll kind of go through. I took a lot of notes when I was reading it, and I'll kind of go through and ask you a bunch of questions about it. Yeah. All we really have, all that we are acquainted with directly is experience, is a world of qualities that's in our entire lives. Our entire lives is a string of phenomenality, a string of qualitative dynamisms, so to say. We infer that there is a physical world out there beyond those qualities of my conscious perception because it helps us make sense of a few things, like we all seem to share the same world beyond our own minds, so there must be something out there, or I can't change the world by a mere act of volition. I have to physically interfere with it if I want to change it, or measurable brain activity in my brain correlates with my experiential life as experienced from a first-person perspective. So, there are reasons to infer a physical world that is not experiential. But the moment you make that inference, you create a huge problem, which is the heart problem of consciousness. There is nothing about quantities, about mass, charge, momentum, spin, in terms of which you could deduce the redness of red, or how it feels to have a bellyache, or how it feels to have your heart broken, or to taste strawberries. I mean, is sweet spin up and salty spin down? It could be the other way around. It's a completely arbitrary bridge, right? There is only a correlation, but there is no deduction logic there inherent to that. So, what I've tried to do is to get rid of that assumption of a physical world out there that is not mental, essentially, and replace it with a form of objective idealism. There is indeed a world out there beyond my mind, my personal mind, but that world, that transpersonal environment that we all seem to occupy or inhabit, is itself mental. And what's happening in perception is simply the translation of certain mental qualities into other mental qualities because they interfere or impinge with one another. And there is nothing extraordinary about this. We have plenty of experience with this. For instance, your thoughts interfere with your emotions. They are qualitatively very different, but they interfere on one another. A certain line of thought can trigger all kinds of emotions. And the other way around, as well, certain emotions will impinge on your thoughts and bring you down different avenues of thought, different avenues of reasoning. So that certain qualitative mental dynamisms impinge and influence other mental dynamisms, we know that this can happen, nature is telling us all the time that this happens. So the key of my thesis is to say there is a world out there, it's mental. It has certain qualities that are experienced from a first person perspective, from the perspective of the inanimate world at large. I don't have access to that, but it impinges on me as a dissociated aspect of that universal mentality. And that impingement is what we call perception. It's a translation of certain qualities out there into the qualities that I experience as an individual personal mind. And that avoids the hard problem while preserving a world out there that maintains its own state regardless of whether anybody is looking at it or not. This is really interesting. So we could say something like it seems to be that there are a bunch of different types of things that relate to one another. So like I have in front of me, I have this Rubik's Cube, and if I were to be really precise about what I'm referencing, well, I'm having a certain type of experience. There's the orangeness and there's the whiteness and the blueness over on this side, and I kind of have a theory about why I'm having those experiences. But it also correlates. It has some relation to a tactile feeling as well. I have some feeling in my fingers. I have some feeling that I say comes from these things that I call fingers. So I have like corresponding sensory impressions and I build a theory about what the world is. Now, something that's interesting about this is people who aren't monists like myself, we have a big problem which is to say, okay, so we have this theory that there's a physical world out there beyond our experiences and it has some relation to our experiences, but how do those two things interact? Like how do you even get sensory experiences from a physical world that's not made up of sensory experiences? And we have a difficult job of trying to explain this interaction problem, but you and other monists don't have that problem at all. Well, the reason there seems to be interactions between objects is because they're in all the same ontological categories. You literally don't have any interaction problem that I can see. Yeah, I mean, I'll even go a step further. That there are two qualitatively different points of view to an experience is also an empirical given. I have a first-person point of view to my conscious inner life, but if you were to put me in a functional MRI scanner right now and take readings of my brain activity, or if you were to crack open my skull and take a peek into my brain and seeing blood flow and if you had special eyes, if you could see also the electric activity going on there, you would have a second or third-person point of view to the same experiential dynamisms. I have a first-person, you would have a second-person point of view. In other words, my conscious inner life appears to you or presents itself to you in the form of my physical body. What we call a physical body is this second-person perspective of what I experienced from my first-person perspective. So nature is telling us that there are these two points of view. So what I would say is, let's just stick with nature. The entire inanimate universe is the body of universal consciousness. It's what universal consciousness other than its dissociated aspects, you, me, and every living being. It's what it looks like when observed from across its associative boundary. Matter is the second or third-person perspective of inner experience. That's all there is to it. That's what matter is. I think if we do that, we avoid any arbitrary transition or an arbitrary boundary, ontological boundary somewhere, all that's going on is experience. And experience has at least two different points of view. And from the second person or third-person perspective, it's what we call matter. That's all there is to it. So that sounds nice, but you run into some counter-intuitive implications of this going back to the Rubik's Cube example. So what you're saying is, this Rubik's Cube, I'm having a sensory impression over here. I'm having a certain type of experience. But that experience is corresponding to another experience out there in the world. So this right here is consciousness outside of my mind. And my looking at it is what consciousness looks like from another's perspective. Yeah, look, we are talking via a computer now. Suppose I were in front of you. I am an object just like this cube you have in your hands. But for you, it's perfectly intuitive that as you are apprehending this object in front of you that happens to be a biological organism, that this is how my inner experience presents itself to you. There is nothing counter-intuitive to you about this. You know, I have an inner life that doesn't look, from my perspective, doesn't look at all like my physical body. You can touch my physical body. You can look at it. You can take measurements. And none of it will be qualitatively similar to my thoughts, my emotions, my desires. They are qualitatively completely different. And yet you know that these two things are attached. And it's almost, there's a sense of absurdity in conflating the two. So I imagine I were describing your inner experience of life in terms of blood flow. And like, oh, you're a living, you're having a conscious experience. And I start talking about skin cells. It's like, well, that's kind of absurd that you're definitely missing something. Yeah, or neurotransmitters and synaptic clefts. And that's the hard problem. But so that makes sense when I'm looking at your body as an object. But when I'm looking at this, I have no reason to think, at least immediately, that there would be any type of conscious experience taking place in what I call an inanimate object. Yeah, and I'm not saying that this cube is conscious in and of itself. I'm not saying that there is something that is like to be this cube in and of itself. That give you a metaphor. I'm not a metaphor. Imagine this. Imagine that you were a tiny cell level organism, but you are still Steve. You still think you have your cognitive abilities perfectly in place. But you're tiny, maybe even smaller than a cell. And assume that you will get into my bloodstream and you go all the way up to my brain and then you sit on the membrane of a neuron on a synapse with your little legs dangling on a synaptic cleft. And then suddenly you see these neurotransmitter molecules, these serotonin molecules invading that synaptic space between two neurons and attaching themselves into certain receptors on the neuron next door, which for you would be like the other side of a canyon. The other side of the Grand Canyon. You have these serotonin molecules going across the Grand Canyon and attaching to these little receptors on the other side. And you would turn to me and say, it's so counterintuitive that there could be consciousness behind that. There's just these chunky molecules now floating around in some liquid attaching to some... It's a matter of perspective. I don't think the cube is conscious in and of itself for the exact same reason that I don't think a neuron in my brain is conscious in and of itself. I don't think there is anything it is like to be a single neuron in my brain. I think only that there is something it is like to be Bernardo. In other words, my entire nervous system, my entire body. And the neuron is a part of it. A part that is sort of arbitrarily defined as any object in nature. The boundaries of an object are nominal. They are defined on the basis of convenience for us to be able to talk about things. There is no fundamental boundary between the constituents of our body. So for the same reason that a single neuron is not conscious in and of itself, it's just a part of something else that is conscious. The cube is just a part of the inanimate universe. And then I would say the inanimate universe as a whole is conscious in and of itself. Not the cube. And in addition to the inanimate universe as a whole, I think living beings are conscious in and of themselves. Because I think life is just the image, the presentation of a dissociative process in universal consciousness. Not inanimate objects. So you think that there is some kind of experience that the entire universe is having? Yes. I don't think it's necessarily deliberate, reflective, intentional. I rather think given the stability of, the seeming stability of the laws of nature, their predictability, I rather think that what's going on in universal consciousness is some low-level, instinctive, experiential activity because it is so predictable. So if we're talking about an actual experience that, I don't want to say the term emerge, but would correlate with the entire universe as a whole, as like there's the state of the entire universe, and that is directly corresponding to a type of experience. In the universal experience, are there also our experiences? So like is the universal consciousness experiencing what we're experiencing in addition to other types of experience, or are we kind of having unique experiences? I think living organisms are dissociated complexities of universal consciousness, just like a person can have dissociated altars. I think the universe undergoes dissociation, and we call that life. That's the name we give to that dissociative process, and the image of an altar, or dissociated complex, is a living organism. It's the way it looks like from across its dissociative boundary. So from that perspective, the remaining experiential dynamisms in universal consciousness, other than what is dissociated away in the form of life, doesn't experience our inner lives. Because for the same reason that we are dissociated from it, it is dissociated from us. I don't know what's going on in the galaxy of Andromeda right now, so I don't think universal consciousness knows right now what's going on in my mind. Because as a living being, I am dissociated from it, and it goes two ways. I think as it is in itself, this universal experiential flow, so to say, is pretty much instinctual. And what it knows of us is the result of our impinging on it. Let me explain this. For me, sense perception is the result of the experiences behind the inanimate universe impinging on our altar, impinging on the dissociative boundary of our altar. That impingement is what we call sense perception. It's the name we give to it. So we know what's going on in the universe insofar as we can observe it through the mediation of our sense organs. From that perspective, our acting on the inanimate universe by being alive, walking around, kicking rocks, shooting rockets to the moon, it must be registered by universal consciousness as well. But you see, is it really registered? Because if you put it in scale, and we know today that the universe at its largest scales does look like a neural network. It's quite uncanny. It does look like that. But it's a gigantic neural network. So we kicking a rock or shooting a rocket to the moon is probably a lot less than a particle of dust landing on the back of our hands, if you know what I mean. So to summarize how it is, I don't think universal consciousness knows what's going on in our minds. Certainly not directly because it's dissociated and through some form of reversed perception may be something but it's minimal, negligible. In other words, God doesn't know what's going on with us. So what would the explanation be for how these dissociative altars come to be? So is it like some mechanical process that created these altars? Why should they be? Well, clearly the regularity of nature or the laws of nature, if we allow for some metaphysical room for maneuver here, the laws of nature clearly allow for it. Otherwise it wouldn't be happening. It is part of what can happen. If life can form as it clearly can, even from non-life, because a-biogenesis must have happened taking place at some place at some point in this distant past. So the laws of nature or the inherent dispositions of universal consciousness allow for this to happen. Perhaps even make it inevitable. But to say anything beyond that would be to anthropomorphize universal consciousness, is to say that because dissociation in human beings occurs as a reaction to trauma and to say that universal consciousness must have been traumatized by its profound isolation and sense of loneliness. I could tell a beautiful story about it. It was so lonely and desperate that it was traumatized and broke up into all these little bits and pieces that we call living organisms. But I would not do that because it's anthropomorphization. It's beyond our knowledge. All we can say is if my interpretation is correct about what life is, it's the image of dissociation, then clearly dissociation is something allowed, maybe even inevitable, given the inherent natural dispositions of universal consciousness. So when you say inherent natural dispositions, this is interesting because you have to put it in the context of it being mental. When I think of the laws of nature, I don't think of mental things. I think of laws that are abstract and existing but not conscious or not mental. So how do you conceive, then, of what the laws of nature are? I mean, they've got to be mental, but it almost feels like there could be, why should they be the way that they are if they're mental? Could they be some other way? Does the mind of God just have a different set of rules? Yeah. I think where this intuition is coming from is when we attribute our own type of mental life to the universe as a whole. I'm not saying that universal consciousness is reflective, thoughtful, deliberate. I don't think that it knows what it is experiencing. It experiences it. Do you think it's volitional? Otherwise, nothing would be happening. It is trying to get somewhere, maybe blindly, as Schopenhauer said. It's a blind will. It doesn't really know what it's doing, but it experiences it and it experiences some form of entities that leads to the dynamisms of the universe. Otherwise, nothing would be happening. Nothing would be going on. So I am with Schopenhauer on that. It is intrinsically and inherently volitional. Not only because something is happening, but because volitional experiential states are the prototypical example of an endogenous experiential state. Before life formed, there was no perception in the universe. There were only endogenous states. It's an implication of what I'm saying. And what is an endogenous state? It's a state that doesn't depend on seeing, smelling, feeling. It's something that is entirely endogenous. It comes from within. And volition comes from within. So two reasons to say that Schopenhauer was correct. Yes, it's the will. The will is the correct name for universal consciousness. Because it's not only experiential. It's volitional in nature. It's dynamic, has impetus, and it's endogenous. So if you don't attribute our own self-reflective, metacognitive abilities to this instinctive, experiential viewed, so to say, it becomes a lot less problematic to imagine that it is what it is. It does what it does. Because it can't do anything else. What it does is a reflection of what it is. It is not anything else, so it can't do anything else, if you know what I mean. So you end with the same problem that you have when you ask why are the laws of nature this and not something else. Well, because that's how it is. And then if you are a kind of philosophically loose physicist, you could say, oh, they're countless parallel universes and the laws of nature are all different. Yeah, okay. If we give ourselves these kind of latitudes, soon we end up with the gnomes and what else. But anyway. Well, so it's interesting, because when you, I think correctly point out that we shouldn't anthropomorphize the universe. We shouldn't think in this theory that its consciousness is like our consciousness. To me, it seems like attributing volition to it would be something like an anthropomorphization. What I would do now, I'll repeat what Chopin already wrote about, so cogently, 200 years ago. When he said the essence of everything is the will, he immediately made a 10 page long disclaimer by saying, but you shouldn't think of the will as your own human volition. Because your own human volition is metacognitive. You don't only want. You know that you want. And you can take your wantings, your desires, not only as a content of consciousness, but as an object of conscious reflection. And my cat can't do that. My cat may want to eat, may want to pee, but my cat's not thinking, oh, I want to eat now, or I want to pee now. They don't do that. A crocodile doesn't do that. It's not self-reflective. It doesn't have metaconsciousness or conscious metacognition, which would be the technical term. So you have to imagine yourself in the position of a purely instinctual animal, like a cricket, a bee, a crocodile. And you have to imagine that there is still experiencing but not thought, metacognitive thought processes about what those experiences feel like. For us, it's nearly impossible to remove this metacognitive baggage, so to say, and try to imagine purely instinctive, desiring, willing. But it certainly is there. I mean, it is there in kids. A toddler knows when it wants to eat, it will cry all right, but it's not thinking, oh, now I want to eat. It doesn't have this semiotic reflective skills in which you name a content of your own consciousness and you go ponder about it in a self-reflective way. So that's how you have to imagine this we with large. Another thing, sorry to speak so long about this, but you have to take into account time scales as well. The universe has been around for 13.8 billionaires. You and I have been around for a couple of decades. So what for you and I is a universe whose laws never change, and therefore it's difficult to imagine that it's mental because for us, something that's mental is inherently sort of unpredictable, whimsical, right? And now the laws of nature don't seem to change. Yeah, but look at that in the context of 13.8 billion years. What for the universe would be the blink of an eye? For you would be civilizations rising and falling. Yeah, perhaps a lot more than that. So these two things to keep in mind, the time scale and the fact that you have to abstract away your own metacognitive abilities, which is almost impossible to do. So something when you're discussing that and in the dissertation that kept coming up in my mind, which is part of the reason I'm actually a substance pluralist, is about the rules. We're talking about the rules of nature, the laws of nature. So I have an ontology in which there are mental things, there are experiences, there are physical things, meaning there's a realm in which there are individual geometric units, geometric atoms that are composed that make up 3D space. In addition to those two systems, I think there are also laws and rules which govern the relation between the states in the physical system and maybe the states in the mental system as well. So for you, how are you conceiving of rules in this ontology? Because I'll give you an example. So let's say that you're sitting next to me and I'm having an experience of viewing your first person experience from the second person. So you're having an experience and then I'm kind of seeing what the experience looks like from the outside in your theory. But it still to me implies that there's some rules of the game, that like there's a particular reason why your experiences look the way they do from my perspective. So the shirt you're wearing is blue and that's reflective of some type of experience that's taking place in the universe, but why should it be blue? And for me, I think, oh, it's because there are laws that govern the relation between things. How do you think about that? Mind has laws. Maybe I wouldn't go as far as to say that these laws reflect some kind of eternal metaphysical necessity, but it certainly feels like that in practice. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, talked about the archetypes. And archetypes are basic templates, rules, if you will, almost laws according to which the dynamisms of mind unfold. They are recognizable, classifiable. They repeat themselves across cultures, across races. I mean, humans don't even have races, but across variations of the human genome. And these are regularities that can be observed. For instance, the archetype of the hero, which is the key archetype of our civilization. Well, can I interrupt you here? So when I'm thinking about laws, this is a thing, I still don't have fully sorted out the ontology of what laws are. This is not an easy question. But there's a difference between saying there are regularities in our experience, which is a description, a correct description of our experience, and saying there's a cause of the regularity of our experience. So I'm interested, to me, the law is not the fact of the regular experience. What's an explanation for it? Some abstract rule, principle thing? Yeah. All we can observe empirically are regularities. To extrapolate from those regularities and say, they will be like this for all time and to the end of the universe, that's a metaphysical inference. Now you're saying there is something metaphysical behind this that enforces a relationship of necessity. And that's a metaphysical step. So the question in two ways, I could say, well, we don't need that relationship of necessity. We could just say there are regularities in mind because that's just the way mind is. I mean, if you say there is universal mind, you're not putting forward anything more complex than if you say, well, there is a physical world out there that does what it does because it is what it is. The same thing goes with mind. If I replace that physical world and I say there are objective experiential dynamisms out there, then it is what it is because universal consciousness is what it is. That's why it does what it does and not anything else because it isn't something else. It has certain innate inherent properties, some innate inherent dispositions that make it do what it does. It's a direct consequence of what it is. In other words, this universal mind has properties which would correspond to what we call the laws of nature. So I would describe then these dynamisms as following archetypal templates which we observe in human beings themselves. Our behavior tends to be highly influenced or organized, which would be the correct word, by these archetypal templates of behavior, the archetype of the hero, of the mother, of the old wise man, of the shadow, all these patterns of behavior that Jung has identified. But even if we would go and say, well, but I really want to be able to say that this is a necessity, it's not only a regularity that could change tomorrow, that so happens to be like it is now because time scales are different, so it seems very regular now, but maybe in the next billion years things would change. If you want to say, no, I want to say this is a necessity and it will be like this for all time, then I don't think the problem is any different from the same problem you're facing in physicalism. You still make a metaphysical postulate that this universal consciousness has metaphysical properties that enforce the necessity of its behavior. And the expression of that behavior is what we call the empirical laws of physics as we observe them. In other words, I don't think idealism makes this problem any different or any worse than the equivalent problem you have on physicalism. I think that's true, but I think this is why substance pluralism is superior. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Well, so on that point, I would say the necessity thing might be unnecessary in the sense that if we're describing laws as the reasons for states of the system to be the way they are at present, I don't think it necessarily means they have to be that way for all time. I can imagine a circumstance in where there are rules, but according to the rules, the rules change. There's like meta rules. But still with physicalism, this is one of the many reasons that I don't think physicalism is tenable is because it doesn't have any explanation for the regularity of physical phenomena. And I think the idealists run into this problem too. It's one thing, I think, to correctly identify that all we can say with certainty is that there are patterns in our experiences making some assumptions about the reliability of memory, but we won't touch on those. So there are patterns, but I'm interested in actually having an explanation for that. One potential explanation would be like, it's just chance. The regularities in our experiences just so happen to be coherent over time because of chance, I don't find that plausible. I think there has to be some glue, some real glue that's keeping all of these states unified according to particular laws. And this is why I can say, okay, the physicalist really has to posit laws governing the base level phenomena. And I think the idealist doesn't have to, but to me it seems like you have to posit some real glue keeping the mental states together. Why shouldn't it be that the blue experience I'm having right now isn't red? There's got to be some reason why it's blue and not red. I concur with you. I tend towards making this metaphysical postulate of some fundamental rules of the game or even matter rules of the game. But unlike you, I don't think we need to postulate a different ontological category for that. I think we just postponed the problem because if anything is, if anything exists, so we're talking about ontology here, the nature of being, if anything is, it has properties. Being entails properties, modes of being. Otherwise it would be total chaos. Nothing would be recognizable. So if you postulate any ontological category at all, whether it be matter, mind, information, or some other abstraction, the fact that it is necessarily entails that it has some kind of property so that it is what it is and not something else. So I think a physicalist would say, I agree with you, Steven, but these rules are entailed by the being of matter. The fact that something is physical, that it has a physical being, entail that it behaves the way it behaves. Necessarily because it has this metaphysical property built into its being. But here's the trouble with that. If we're just talking about physicalism, how do you get that from units of matter? If we're going to posit the existence of the physical world, I'm a reductive physicalist when it comes to the physical world. I think all physical phenomena are literally reducible to areas of space in a particular state. Digital physics. Yeah, digital physics. Geometric atomism, I like to think of it. But if that's the case, if that's all the physical system is, how do you get more than just geometric extension in a state? How do you get these properties that seem to be in addition to the atoms of space in a particular state? I don't see where they fit. There's not enough space in the physical world. And this is why I think, oh, it's got to be abstract then. It's got to be in some other realm. Maybe you have properties or additional states more than just like the taking up of space in geometric atomism, but they've got to be in a different system because they don't fit anywhere else. Yeah, I understand what, okay, I'll pretend that I am agreeing with you and see if we can understand, see if I get it correctly. You're thinking in terms of a kind of cellular automaton. Instead of thinking in terms of particles with properties that traverse space, you're thinking about elementary units of space that have a certain state. So instead of a particle traversing, what we have is adjacent cells flipping their states, creating the illusion that a particle is going across. And then if you think in terms of it as a cellular automaton, you would think, okay, but where are the rules of the cellular automaton? They are not in the states. They determine the states from behind the scenes, right? I don't think this would be a problem for a physicalist. I mean, you're thinking in terms of hardware, software here. Okay. Certain memory elements in the hardware have the states and then other memory elements in the hardware like the registers of the microprocessor have other states which constitute the rules. This is what is actually happening in a cellular automaton. What you see on the screen, whether it's a live or dead like the Game of Life, that famous cellular automaton, is the state of certain memory elements in the video card of your computer. And those states change according to rules. But what are these rules if you really dig down into how is it really implemented? Those rules are in other memory elements of that hardware. In the processor cache memory, in the processor register files. As for productive physicalists, all we would be describing is just other areas of space in particular states. The abstraction here is forget that the hardware obey physical laws. We pretend that there are no physical laws. There are only memory elements, okay? Okay. Then we can compare apples to apples. In a cellular automaton, the cell states are the states of memory elements. And the rules that organize the dynamisms of the cell states are also encoded as states in other memory elements that you happen not to see. But at the end of the day, it's all memory elements. But why would they be related to one another? So if you've got the elements over here and then you've got the rules coded over here, why would over here affect over there? You programmed them to be so in the case of the cellular automaton and in the case of the universe, why would they go because that's how the universe is? I don't think the programming argument works because if we're purely productive physicalists, I don't think you actually could explain programming in that sense. I don't think it makes sense to say the reason the behavior over here is the way that it is is because we have another pattern of position and state over here. I don't think that glues them together. I think you have to have some type of abstraction to have the code not written in the same level of the system. Because otherwise, where do you get governance from? Over here, I don't see how I can govern over there unless you have abstraction. You have some unity across space that's not made up of space. A physicalist would say, who would guess I would find myself in a position of defending physicalism? A modern physicalist would say, electrons, photons, all this stuff, it's secondary. It is epiphenomenal. This is not what's really there. Not even space and time. That would be a modern loop quantum gravity theorists would tell you, not even space-time is fundamental. But let's forget loop quantum gravity. Otherwise, it gets too complex. Let's just take the mainstream position now, which is quantum physics extended by quantum field theory. It's the relativistic extension of quantum physics. A feud quantum physicist would tell you the fundamental entities of nature are feuds. And everything you see are excitations of those feuds. Now, why do the excitations obey the patterns and regularities they obey? In other words, the laws of nature? Well, because the feuds are what they are. It's an inherent innate property of the feud that is so simply because this is how this universe is. And what glues everything together is the feud. I think that is probably what they would say. Though I don't find that fundamentally persuasive. I actually don't like the continuous fields in physics. I think there's a problem with infinity here, but I have to go down that rabbit hole. So for you, so then porting, now you can put the idealist hat back on. So are you content with the explanation that the patterns that we see and experience are because that's the way mind is. It's just built into the system rather than, you don't see that the necessity of positing some real, really existing rules that govern the behavior of the experiences? I think whether these patterns are enforced by necessity or by habit or some other contingent phenomenality, whatever the case is, I do acknowledge we have to grant certain metaphysical properties to mind. And what do I mean by that? Physical is what you observe, right? Is what you empirically observe. You can measure it's there, be it through your senses or be it through introspection. As an idealist, I would grant introspection as a form of empirical observation as well. So all that you can observe is that things tend to happen in a regular way. Every time you look, they seem to behave according to those regularities. That's all you can say. You can never say it's an eternal necessity that they will always behave according to the patterns and they have always behaved according to this pattern. That's not empirically accessible. That's not unobservable. And therefore it's not physical. It is metaphysical. The mere fact that these regularities seem to happen, even if they are not eternal, even if it's not a relationship of necessity, even if it's contingent, a relationship of habit, for instance, the fact that there is a habit, the fact that there are these observable regularities, whether they are eternal or not, motivate me to say I will grant a metaphysical, or a set of metaphysical properties to mind on account of which I make sense of these regularities. In other words, there is something metaphysical about mind which makes it behave according to the regular templates in which it does behave as observed. Are those metaphysical things mental in nature? Are all those properties and rules, are they still mental? I would say it is because by saying that they are metaphysical, all I'm saying, all I'm doing is I am acknowledging that I can't be sure through empirical observation. Mind, if mind is all there is, there is a limit to how far mind can go in knowing itself because it is the thing doing the knowing. Schopenhauer already explained this. According to Schopenhauer, and I subscribe to this, knowledge entails a subject-object pair. There is a knower and a known. But if all there is is mind, then mind is the knower and mind is the known. So all that mind can know is the part of it that is known, not the part of it that is doing the knowing, if you know what I mean. For me, what I call these metaphysical properties of mind is those that remain veiled behind the part doing the knowing, as opposed to the part being known. But it's all mind. This is where you and I are doing a different thing methodologically because when you posit the veil, you posit the veil and say it's all mind. I would posit the veil, I guess, but I wouldn't make a claim about it being mind. I would say, I don't know. And it makes sense to me, I actually find it more, maybe more beautiful or more intuitive or something to say, it's not mind. The behind the veil is abstract laws. That's the thing that we can't necessarily, we can have mental experiences thinking about them, but they aren't themselves fundamentally mental. So why do you make that turn then and say they're mental? I sympathize a lot with the agnostic position. It's probably the best position. The question is, is it humanly feasible to honestly adhere to it? Because we are storytelling animals. We are meaning-seeking storytelling animals. We always need some kind of base case scenario for what might be going on. Can you really hold on to your agnosticism? Truly, as you go about your day, deliberately or not, it's very hard. We are always looking at least for a most likely hypothesis. So I would respect the agnosticism. I would even bow to it by saying that this is where I would like to be, but I don't feel myself humanly capable to stop there. Well, just on this one issue, just on this issue of saying there are metaphysical principles or rules of the game and we don't have to make a claim that they're mental. In terms of reasoning, I sympathize with that a lot. The problem is we always make that step. For instance, you make the step by saying it is different from meditation and it is different from matter. You can't help yourself. You wrote about it. I said, though, I'm not sure. I'm not saying this is the way that it is. I'm just saying this is the leap. This is a similar leap that I think physicalists make where they're too quick to say it's all got to be physical because I'm just positing that assertion. It's like, well, actually, if you keep your options open, there could be many, many different types of existence that we just don't have access to and we don't really know about. If you stick to that agnosticism, I am there with you. But the moment you take the step and say, so there might be other mental categories, sorry, there might be other ontological categories, I would say, but what reason do I have to believe that it may be other because all I ever have is experience, is mentality. The moment you postulate that hypothesis, the moment you put it on the table, I will react to that immediately. But if you don't say that and you just say, we don't know, then I'm there with you. This is the most perfect segue ever because this actually gets into parsimony. So why is it the case that we like particular theories and evaluate them as superior or inferior to others? That's the thing I wanted to talk to you about. So I actually think there's something like parsimony going on here where for me not to make a positive claim, I feel like is the easier argument to make. I want to start maybe with a challenge to your idealism from the perspective of parsimony, which is funny because you're the monist and I'm the pluralist, so you think usually you have the easier job of that. But when we're talking about the Rubik's Cube, you're actually positing an additional thing than I am. In order to explain what's going on here, you're saying there's an experience we don't have access to which is taking place that we're kind of looking at. And for me I'm like, okay, well that seems like you're kind of positing an additional entity maybe or additional something going on than I am. I feel like I don't need that explanation. Unless you were a solipsist and you think that all that's going on is your own life, that I don't really have an inner life, that I only exist in so far as the images you see on your computer screen. In other words, I'm just a phantasm. I'm a ghost. I'm a zombie. It would be the philosophical term. There's nothing it is like to be me. I only exist in so far as what you see of me. That would be solipsism. Unless you're a solipsist, you have to infer something beyond your personal experience to account for that. I'm sorry, the solipsism, so that would be correct. But there really is a big difference between positing the existence of experience outside of my own when I'm looking at another human creature versus when I'm only looking at an inanimate object. I can imagine a world in which I just woke up. I was on planet Earth and there were no other living beings. I didn't have to eat anything like a bunch of inanimate objects. I wouldn't then have a reason deposit experience going beyond my own. You do posit that there is experience behind this facade that you see, that Bernardo has in his life. Bernardo is made of matter. Atoms, force fields. I wouldn't put it that way. When I think of Bernardo, I think I'm referencing a conscious experience. I think that there's a corresponding state of a world which is the atoms in the physical matter, but that's not Bernardo. That's Bernardo's body. You posit that they have an inner life. You have no access to that. You do have access to my body, but then you grant that my body is made of atoms and force fields. I wouldn't quite say that either. I think it's the case that I'm having experiences, but I don't actually have experiences of the physical world. I think that there is a physical world that's in a particular state, and there's a particular relation between the physical state and the experiences that I'm having. Still, so suppose that there are these multiple ontological categories that we just talked about, but there is a correspondence behind this physical body. You see there is an inner life, but that physical body is made of atoms and force fields. Can you deny that? You mash my body, put it in a blender, and then you put it in an instrument. You see that it's carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, right? I think that there is definitely a correspondence between a physical body and your conscious experiences. This physical body is made of atoms and force fields. Fundamentally, I would say it's units of geometry in a particular state, but at a microscopic level, we'll say it's atoms and force fields. Whatever it is, isn't it the same that makes up this cube in your hand? It's the same atoms and force fields. Yes, it would be a different pattern. And it's the same atoms and force fields that seem to constitute the image of the entire inanimate universe as far as you can see it. It's carbon, hydrogen, exotic elements, rubidium, whatever. It's the same atoms and force fields, right? Yes. So there is no discontinuity, my point. All I'm saying is that if you posit in a life behind me and my body is made of the same atoms and force fields as the entire inanimate universe, you might as well posit in a life behind the entire inanimate universe as well. Here's where I think I disagree, which is there's a particular behavior of Bernardo's physical body that gives me justification to posit, oh, maybe there's inner life going on here. But with the Rubik's Cube, there is no such behavior. I'm looking at it, I poke it, I can probably throw it against the wall, say ouch or anything like that. So I feel like I don't even have a reason to posit this additional thing, which is, oh, maybe there's a thing that it's like to be a Rubik's Cube or an internal experience of Rubik's Cube because it's not acting that way. Remember, I don't say that there is anything that is like to be a Rubik's Cube. I think there is something it is like to be the entire inanimate universe as a whole. And the Rubik's Cube is just part of that image that we call the inanimate universe. And it's not conscious in and of itself for the same reason that a neuron in my brain is not conscious in and of itself. So I would say those experiences, maybe the existence of experiences of beings that we don't see their behavior. Yeah, I got your point. Yeah, so isn't that... It's a matter of scale. If you were a microscopic little guy sitting on a synaptic clef in my brain, all you would see is mechanical action going on, neurotransmitters being released in some kind of soup, attaching to some little receptors on the other side, electrical currents flowing sometimes, sometimes not, sometimes potentials building. You would say this is all mechanical stuff. I have no reason to postulate in a life behind this. It's just a matter of scale. If you look at rocks and boulders falling down, mountains bouncing down, you'd see cuts, all mechanical stuff. But you zoom out and you look at the entire structure of the universe. As far as we can know, it's at its highest scales. You would see neural networks for lack of a better descriptor. I would say this is all just a matter of scale. The universe definitely behaves the best we know is that there was a big bang and inflation at some point. And the universe is dynamic. It's doing stuff. It's doing highly creative stuff. Quantum fluctuations in the early universe gave rise to galaxies, stars, planets. You and me, it's very busy doing stuff which seems creative. Life is around. The amazing variety of life seems to defy mechanistic escalations for it. But anyway, my argument is I understand your intuition, but I would attribute that merely to scale. And certainly, not at the same level of importance, I think, compared to the observation that my body and the inanimate universe as a whole, insofar as we can perceive them, are made of the bloody same atoms and force fields. So if behind these atoms and force fields, there is conscious experience, why wouldn't there be behind the inanimate universe as a whole, especially taking into account that it looks like a neural network? I think that is a totally valid argument. I definitely hear what you're saying, but would you grant it? I can add to that. Before I move on, I just wanted to add another argument. You also have to keep in mind that living beings have evolved to survive in a planetary ecosystem. And our behavior has evolved in order to enable that, to enable that survival. So we are kind of reactive and unpredictable because the ecosystem where we live is kind of unpredictable as well. So we evolved these peculiarities, these idiosyncrasies, because we are sort of dissociated complexes that need to maintain their structural integrity in a planetary ecosystem. Universal consciousness does not need to survive in a planetary ecosystem. It's all there is. It did not need to evolve this kind of survival idiosyncrasies to survival behaviors, which of course you will not recognize because you evolved in a planetary ecosystem. So you recognize those that also evolved in a planetary ecosystem. You can relate to them. You have something in common. You have very little in common to universal level experience that doesn't have to survive. It's that within which survival takes place. So I would also attribute your intuition to that. Would you say that... So that is very beautiful. Like I like to think of philosophy as akin to painting. And it's like the philosopher's job is to try to paint the beautiful, incredibly detailed picture to explain the phenomena that we experience in a coherent way. And I think that is beautiful. I think the picture you've just painted is beautiful. But just purely methodologically speaking, isn't it still an additional step at least to posit that there is the cosmic consciousness taking place when you could... I imagine you could have a type of idealism in which you don't have that posit. That's just... It's beautiful. It's a beautiful, gorgeous part of it. And it fits also historically people's religious experiences and talking about God. And there's a whole bunch of meat to that. But it still is kind of methodologically an additional step. Yeah. I don't want to appeal to direct experience because otherwise I wouldn't be doing philosophy as we know in Western civilization in the 21st century. So I would stay away from that. Right. Look, I agree with you that there is an inference here. There is an inference beyond direct personal experience. If you don't make any inference beyond direct personal experience, you are a solipsist. A solipsist could even be an idealist solipsist. All there is is my own mind. Nobody else's mind. There is no universal mind. That is the ultimate skeptical position. But as Russell said, it's a position that even those who claim to adopt don't really do. They don't act accordingly. Because if you're a solipsist, you wouldn't waste time talking to anybody. Couldn't we have a principle then? So I'm not talking about solipsism. Couldn't we say the principle is we posit the existence of experience outside of ourselves when we see patterns of behavior that give us justification to believe there is that type of experience. So like we don't see the patterns of behavior in the Rubik's Cube. We don't posit that there's a thing that is like to be a Rubik's Cube. I do see the patterns of behavior with Bernardo. So I posit it. With the universe, I don't really see patterns of behavior in a way that I can recognize to say, ah, that is a experiencing thing. Then you're left with having to explain what it is then, the inanimate universe. What it is, the Rubik's Cube. And then you could say, you are left with a discontinuity in your ontology because you would say, well, Bernardo's physical body can be accounted for by the inference that Bernardo has conscious in her life. And his conscious in her life appears to me or presents itself to me in the form of his physical body because he's conscious from within. So you accounted for the existence of my physical body. But you did not account for the Rubik's Cube. Well, so you would have... I would say that would be backwards. And I could say that I make the... I account for the conscious experience because of the physical body. So if we start with the idea of 3D space operating along particular mechanics, we can say, oh, it's when those objects in 3D space act a particular way, then we posit that there's consciousness going on. But remember, you have to account for everything. Otherwise you don't have an ontology. So the moment you say that, then you're saying that my conscious experience is in some way as a consequence of the fact that matter organizes itself according to certain structures. And when those structures are not there, then there is no conscious experience. And then you account for the Rubik's Cube. Is that parsimonious? No, you just postulated a physical universe outside consciousness. So you're either left with a discontinuity. I account for certain material objects on the basis of consciousness. But then I can't account for other material objects on that same basis because I don't grant consciousness in their life to them, given that their behavior doesn't allow me to grant it. Or you end up with having to postulate physical structures that themselves then account for consciousness in their life if they organize themselves in certain ways. So it's not parsimonious either way, I would claim. But here's where I think the general story of emergence goes awry, because I would totally agree with you that the physical system by itself cannot be satisfactory to explain the emergence of consciousness. I don't think that makes any sense. But if you're a real pluralist, you can say it's not actually just the physical system. It's the physical system plus the laws. There you go. When the physical systems in particular states, I like to say information about those states are kind of put into a universal function, and then output states are generated that are mental experiences. I understand your position. But you started this line by saying, well, aren't you violating parsimony? That's how you started it. And now you're saying, well, but I'm a pluralist. So I would say you didn't catch me there because you could only counter me by postulating more stuff than I'm postulating or being left with a discontinuity. I think it's less metaphysically parsimonious, but I do think there's like a methodological parsimony here where I do think that there are particular mental moves that I'm not making because maybe a more agnosticism or something like that, that I see you making. So it's interesting because I hadn't thought about it in that context. I do think metaphysically you got me on the parsimony. There's no doubt. I mean, I can one up you and say there is only one thing in existence. That is literally the most parsimonious position you can take, but I don't think that's correct. I don't think there's just one thing. I don't think there's only one thing. I think there is only one ontological category. No, I'm saying if we want to play the metaphysical parsimony game, I can say there's only one thing and you can't get more parsimonious than that. There's not zero, there's just one. The boundaries of things are sort of nominal and arbitrary anyway, and where does the car end and the road begins? I understand your point. I do think it's a very slippery road. Just so I get some satisfaction out of it. The parsimony of a metaphysics is, for me, matter is always one and the same thing. It is always the outer appearance of inner experience, and that's all there is to it. So I account for the matter of your body on the basis of your inner experience, and I account for the matter in the entire inanimate universe on the basis of the inner life of the entire inanimate universe. So what I'm doing is, look, I'm acquainted with the experience at a personal level. I know that. I don't need to be skeptical about that. I know my personal experience exists, but to account for certain things, like we all seem to be inhabiting the same world, other people seem to behave like me and have bodies analogous to mine. So I'm not a solipsist, so what I do is I acknowledge that there is more Earth beyond the horizon. I can't see beyond the horizon, but I reasonably assume that the Earth continues on as Earth, although I can't see it anymore. So I reasonably assume that experience continues on beyond me, beyond the boundaries of my personal inner life, but it's still experience in the same way that it's still Earth. A physicalist or a pluralist would say, well, beyond the horizon, it's not Earth. It's something totally else. And that I think is less reasonable. But methodological parsimony, just quickly on that point, I recognize that I think it's a very slippery road. It's the basis of people who endorse Everett's multi-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, which basically states that everything, literally everything in the physical universe that can possibly happen, does happen in a parallel universe. Just to add on that, there's a philosopher who I've had some discussions with who takes it a step farther, not specifically on the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, but he says he believes that there's an infinite timeline as well. So not only is there every possible physical construction ever, but there's that a literal infinity times over. Yes, there are four types of parallel universes in quantum mechanics. The Everett interpretation is only one of them. There are at least three other types. But let's not get into that. It's enough to talk about Everett interpretation. The very idea that everything that could possibly happen does happen seems to be the complete antithesis to parsimony. It's like the least parsimonious thought a human being could ever, ever have. And how do they defend it on the basis of methodological parsimony? Well, I would agree. If all we have is Schrodinger's equation and we don't have any nonlinear process to account for the fact that we don't see a superposition, we see a definite world, if I parsimoniously reject that addition, then I am left with the multi-world interpretation and that's because of methodological parsimony. You see how slippery a road that is? I totally agree. Now, I would use the term maybe methodological parsimony, but I totally acknowledge that it has been abused in that circumstance. Yeah, because all it means is that methodological parsimony reflects, don't get me wrong, I don't mean in the way it might sound. Sure. It basically puts a value on a certain laziness of thought. It basically says, if I can't make sense of it in a way that sounds clean and satisfying to me, then it's not methodologically parsimonious. That's anthropocentric. It's not a statement about nature. It's a statement about your theoretical imagination and its limits. Could we say the same thing about metaphysical parsimony, which is still your aesthetic preference in the sense for simplicity? I don't think so because we exist. Something exists. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know that one ontological category exists. Whatever it is, one exists. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. That wouldn't be this conversation. All I'm saying is that I want to stick to what is given. It's a statement about nature. Nature has given me direct acquaintance with one ontological category. I will run with it. I have another... I do want to talk about time because you had some really interesting stuff in your dissertation about time, but I want to pursue this a little bit more. This is really interesting. You say time presents us with one ontological category. Is that true, though? What do you get this concept of category from? When I meditate on my experiences, I think there are sounds, which are a certain type of experience. There are sights, which seem to be a totally different type of thing, like a different category. I could posit a weak ontology and say there are lots of types of things. There are sense, there are sights, there are sounds. All of these things seem like they come in different categories. Why would you say there is one category? If you parse apart experience, there seem to be many. Do you experience them all? Do you experience sight? Do you experience sound? Do you experience taste? There is definitely a common thread among them, which is the consciousness of it. Yeah. There you are. That's the commonality that brings them together on this umbrella of mentality or phenomenality or experience, whatever you want to call it. It's one thing, the ontological category, it's one thing. The other thing is the dynamisms within that category. A physicalist would say there is only matter, but matter has many dynamisms. There is plasma, there is vapor, there are solids, there are stars exploding, planets forming, there are all kinds of things, waterfalls, living organisms. There are many dynamisms within that one ontological category that we call matter. A physicalist, an idealist would say it's mind, but mind has many types and dynamics of experience. But we still theorize, I think, about types of existence that seem to be outside experience without much difficulty, though. When we were talking about the laws, when we talk about the laws of nature, are we actually talking about our experiences or we're talking about the fact that in our experiences there are patterns, but then we're talking about something that we don't experience, which is kind of the cause of the regularity of the patterns. So it seems to me like we're immediately, it's a very easy step to start theorizing about stuff outside of that first ontological category of existence. You're theorizing outside your personal experience, but you are not necessarily requiring a different ontological category. Not requiring it, but to say that the laws are experiential to me, that seems like a specific claim. So to say there are laws, but when I think of my experience, I don't think of my experience having a lot of control over other experiences. But when I think of a law, I think of something that somehow glues together states and controls how future states render, and it's like, well, that's a totally different type of thing. That can't be experienced. I mean, I guess it could be experienced, but it seems like it's something else. I can relate to your intuition. You're very attached to that intuition. Very much. I don't think it's necessary because I think the existence of a ontological category already requires that it be what it is. And the mere fact of its being entails certain preferential dispositions of behavior. It entails that it will do certain things and not others, otherwise it wouldn't be to begin with. I think the very being requires what you're looking for. It's already embedded in there. The moment you grant being, you grant properties. The moment you grant being to something that is dynamic, you grant that it has certain behavioral properties that may configure discernible patterns and regularities. Or it could be entirely random, but empirically it isn't. I guess it's something... I guess just to close the parsimony thread, I think it's something like, because my experience seems to be so varied, I feel like I can come up with a bunch of different meaningful categories of things. I guess I don't find it as big a problem to posit a plurality of categories, where it's like I could see somebody, I could imagine a circumstance where somebody says there's only one type of thing, smell. And then they go around and they try to explain sight in terms of smell. It's like, well, technically that's more parsimonious, but I don't think that's right. I think nature comes in a bunch of different categories. I guess that's how I'm looking at it. Would you consider the sense of smell ontologically different than the sense of sight? I think you could make that case. I think they might have a common fact of them being experienced, but I think you could come up with a category in which, for example, spatial representation, spatial existence is something visual, and scent doesn't have spatial existence. So it seems like, oh, it's a non-spatial thing. But then how would you account for the consistency across sense modalities? I mean, early on in our conversation today you said, you know, what's the thing? The thing is when my sense of touch correlates with my sense of sight, with my sense of smell, so there seems to be a common root across all sensory modalities, which seems to make a case for it all being reducible to the same ontological category. Well, for me, and I appreciate you flattering my pluralism here. This has been great for me. I hope you've enjoyed it as well. I'm enjoying it. The way that I would put it is, the reason that all of those experiences come unified is because there actually is some three-dimensional state space in which there's information about the system, information is put into the kind of a mathematical function, and the mental experiences are outputs of the information going into the algorithm. So because the mental experience is itself kind of its own category as an output of the universal function, it would make sense that they're all going to be experiential. So I don't think that's hard to explain why the sight and this smell and all those things come unified together. What you are arguing resonates a lot with digital physics and pan computationalism. One is a well-known angle on physics, and the other one is an ontology. We all have different senses of plausibility. What sounds plausible to one of us sounds implausible to another. But what I would ask you is this, do you agree irrespective of our respective senses of plausibility that at the end of the day all you have is experience and everything else is a theoretical inference? I think so. Here's one thing which I don't understand, which is concepts. Because I think of experiences and they have a certain texture to them. But I think of concepts. I think, okay, I kind of am experiencing concepts. What the heck is a concept? Abstract stuff? I don't know what that is. It's an abstraction of certain commonalities. So it seems to me that a concept might be something in addition to an experience. There's almost an epistemological reason for this. So if you think about, I make the claim that you can know with certainty very abstract things about the universe. You can make universal claims like things are the way that they are. It's not saying much, but I believe to be certain about that. But how could it be that I can have that real certainty if it's the case that a concept is merely an experience? Is it the case that I'm saying, oh, I'm having a certain type of experience, namely this concept that things are the way they are. And because of the qualitative nature of my experience, I know the state of the universe. That seems odd to me. So I don't quite know what concepts are. I could see them be something like, well, you can experience concepts, but there's also something in addition to the experience. I see what you mean. There are three of your concepts, like the concept of a table. There are many different types of table, but there are certain commonalities that we abstract out, the intersection of everything we call that a table. But there is this concept about something that is not experienced. The idea that information is the ontological basis of all reality, that behind everything it's an information processing something. It's a concept, but it's also a complete abstraction in the sense that you're not abstracting the commonalities of things that are there in front of you that you can relate to, but you are abstracting beyond what you can experience and you are positing something that is fundamentally beyond your direct acquaintance. And unlike the pan computationalism thing, I'm claiming to have knowledge, to have certain knowledge about some things beyond my experience. I don't know how that's possible. I know I can do it, but I don't know how it's possible. I would say that there is definitely the experience of abstracting. You experience make a conceptual abstraction. There is certainly the experience of believing the abstraction. There is certainly the experience of reasoning about the abstraction. There is certainly the experience of feeling the abstraction to be plausible. But it's a whole other business to say it actually exists out there independent of my conceptualization. Yes. And what is your explanation for how we can... So maybe I should ask this way. Is it the case that you believe we can say certainly true things, even if they're abstract in nature, about things outside of our experience? And if so, how? I think if we are dissociated alters of universal mind, if we are dissociated complexities, our core subjectivity, not our narrative of self. You know, I am this guy who was born that year, has this job, has that name, looks like this. No, no, this is a narrative of self. What I mean is, it's aity, the receiver of experience, that core subjectivity, as Shani called it. That core subjectivity in us, in me, is the same as in you. If you and I were suddenly completely amnesic and locked into sensory deprivation chambers, for at least a brief moment, what it is like to be me would be exactly like what it is like to be you. Because you would have no memories, you would have no different perspectives into the world of sensorium, you would only have it's aity, that bare sense of self without a narrative. That's core subjectivity. It's the same in me, in you, in everybody else, and I would claim also the same behind the inanimate universe as a whole. This is what binds us all together. We are like branches of a tree, but we share the root. So from that perspective, I think, through deep introspection, we do have access to fundamental truths about everything because we are part of everything. I mean, again, that goes back to Schopenhauer. What Schopenhauer did was he went beyond Kant. Kant said, well, all we can know is phenomena, the numinand, the world in itself, the world as it is in itself, behind what I perceive of it is unknowable. And Schopenhauer said, no, it is knowable because you and I are part of the world. We can know something from a first person perspective about the world simply by introspecting because I am a part of it. So from that perspective, I do think we can make sweeping general statements, but I think it's very hard to admit them in analytic philosophy. The moment you want to admit them, the moment you want to grant them validity, you are into non-duality, you go in the direction of an experiential school, not a school of arguments. Yeah, and this is where I currently am, is I'm really puzzled by this. It would be a lot easier if I could pretend that I didn't have universal truth in a very limited respect. So again, when I say I know universal truth, I'm saying A is A, things are what they are. I might not even know what they are, but they are whatever they are. It's very limited and abstract, but the fact that I know that, and I claim certainty that I know that, that posits a metaphysical puzzle. I know it. How the heck do I know it? And where I'm being pushed is something like the universality of mind. It's like, well, what type of metaphysics can I make sense of the claim that these little creatures on Earth truly do have access to some abstract feature of the universe a hundred million light-years away? Simply that the stars are the way they are. I know it. I'm not there. How is that possible? And I'm being pushed into something like idealism, but I'm not quite there yet. You know, we are so lost in abstraction, and this is a union thing about to say we are so lost in abstraction that we forget completely that we are the only carriers of reality that there have ever been and that there will ever be. Without you experiencing, there is no reality as far as you are concerned. We are the carriers of reality, but we abstract so much that we lose that sense. It starts looking, it sounds absurd today. I mean, this is a symptom of our sickness today. It sounds absurd when you say, how can I make a universally valid statement? Well, because you are the only carrier of reality that there will ever be. There is nothing else. If you are not there, there is no reality. You are the center of it. That is one theory. Another theory is that there is this underlying reality, or you could think of it as, there is a universe in which there are many states, and without me and my consciousness, those states would still continue to be. Yeah, that is an abstraction. I agree. I completely agree. But I am okay with the abstraction. I like the story. I find the story compelling. I think actually I am very okay with the abstraction. I am not okay with the conclusions I am coming to through reasoning. The story of human civilization seems to have been a sort of an oscillation between two extremes. At some point in the Middle Ages, we thought we were the center of the world. Back in Greek times, we knew we were not, and now we are the center of the world. And then every time you are on an extreme, you are confronted with the absurdities of that extreme, and then you swing over to the other extreme. Today we are in the extreme that we are nothing. We are completely negligible and totally lost from sight that we are the carriers of reality as far as we are concerned. We will swing. Hopefully one day, this pendulum will lose energy through friction and we will converge to the middle and we will realize that both are correct. Yes, we are the center of the universe. We are the carrier of reality. But also, we are nothing compared to everything that is around. And the trick will be to reconcile these two things in a way that does honor to reason, because right now it doesn't. There is no way within our Aristotelian logic with the law of excluded middle in which this can be accommodated. And because we value reason above all other mental functions today, we value reason above intuition, above feeling, above senses. We value reason above everything else. We are completely possessed by the demon of reason, psychologically speaking. Psychologists know that, by the way. Physicists don't. That we don't see, we don't even grant any validity to the other mental functions that nature imbued us with, that nature has granted us, gifts that we completely ignore, spitting on the plate that we were served with. It will change. Our logic will have to be adapted. Maybe we have to do away with the law of excluded middle and go into some kind of intuitionistic logic. I don't know, but eventually the pendulum will lose energy because every time it swings, there's so much chaos suffering anyway. Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. I guess I still am of the rationalistic mentality where I don't see logic having to be revised. I should say definitely not the law of identity and non-contradiction. Excluded middle can get into the philosophy of language and what does it mean to say the present king of France is bald. That's the ontological import. There's some interesting history here with the philosophy of mathematics as I know. I don't think there's any reason that these things can't be perfectly understood in the context of our own reason. I just think people are really, really, really bad at reasoning and they're not being honest with themselves. That's the end of part one of my conversation with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup. Make sure to tune in next week because we talk about another really important deep topic, which is rationality. Are there real inherent limits to rationality? Are we limiting ourselves by staying within the boundaries of rationality? And can psychedelics be a useful method for somebody exploring those boundaries? Can you gain insights with psychedelics that are meaningful, that don't go away after 48 hours? So that sounds interesting. You're going to love next week, episode number 99. Thanks for listening.