 Could you help us? Hedrick No, I'm I'm not even supposed to be here. I stole a life from mr. Dennis But he'll be back real soon and I can't steal a life for too long or he'll know and get angry Etc. That's a scene from the movie split which portrays a very extreme case of Disassociative identity disorder, but that's just Hollywood, right? well Consider today's interview with dr. Bernardo Castro Okay, suppose that universal consciousness has something akin to DID So it also forms altars. What would an altar look like from the point of view of another altar? I would say it will look like what we call life a body Metabolizing organism hold on that isn't exactly what I'm talking about because you actually kind of pull this into the water So you just wrote a book on the metaphysics of young right young Ian metaphysics something along those lines, right? So young is talking about the shadow, right? Yeah, he's saying well, you know I work with clients and we can kind of treat them just like they're separate But they're really not you know, and then he switches over and he goes yeah, but they are you know And he's kind of saying both. That's right. Yeah No, I think if you study Jung's corpus carefully It's pretty clear that that's what he thought So from that perspective, yeah, it aligns with what some religious traditions would call this connect personalities Jung explicitly associated these Dissociated complexities with what in the tradition has been called the angels and demons Welcome to skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers thinkers and their critics I'm your host Alex Caeris and today Well, I have a real treat at least for me because I welcome back Bernardo castrip to skeptico Bernardo is Without a doubt one of the leading public intellectuals regarding our Philosophical and scientific understanding of human consciousness. He is just so solid We're talking multiple PhDs one in philosophy one in computer science high-level job in the tech world used To work at CERN many books. I've popped up his website website here, which is just outstanding and filled with Just so much different stuff you can check out, but you can see many of his books there he's of course published in many top journals regularly contributes to scientific American and You know his credentials in my opinion and we kind of chatted a little bit about this but maybe in a different way They're unassailable in a way that I don't know to me it kind of creates a litmus test Because if I hear anyone kind of try and brush Bernardo aside with just a wave of the hand I'm like something's up here because you just haven't done the work on this guy And I think that's an extra bonus that we get in in talking to him So Bernardo, welcome back to skeptico. It's so great to connect with you. It's been way too long Great to be here. I like indeed. It's been a while and nice to see you again Okay, well, there's so much going on in your world New books new articles a lot of stuff. Why don't you give us just a brief recap of What's up with you and then the first thing I'm gonna jump into after that is this really interesting? Article essay you co-published unscientific American about disassociative identity disorder because it has an interesting Connection with some of the stuff we've been looking into Over here at skeptico, but start out just because it has been a while. Tell us what's up Since last time we talked I think it was in 2016 or 17 I had published the book on religious myths Then last year in 2019 I published a fairly heavy Yeah, academic oriented book. Actually, it's a collection of papers published in academic journals With text in between to sort of bring everything together and make a coherent case for Metaphysical idealism the the notion that all reality is mental in essence It's not in your mind alone not in my mind alone, but it is mental at the transpersonal level so that book was sort of my My surrender to the requests I have gotten over the years To make my case as rigorously As necessary for academia. Can we pause right there and can you maybe Lay out for people that playing field if you will you know the field that you're playing in Where you're trying to take a position who you're taking a position against You know like recently I've seen some interesting debates that you do and People I think would be kind of surprised with I don't know the philosophical rigor behind consciousness that you're engaged in and at the same time the Scientific we were more well versed on this show with the scientific controversy surrounding Consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness and stuff like that But you kind of have a unique space that you're trying to occupy there lay that groundwork for people I'm trying to occupy the mainstream Because I think materialism is such a bad option It's the worst option in the menu of metaphysical alternatives we have today and it is currently mainstream I think that this is an abomination It's it's an aberration even a cultural aberration that has lasted now over 300 years You're referring to materialism as opposed to yeah, yeah, what's technically called Mainstream metaphysical physicalism But for you and me and the rest of the world Materialism the idea that only unconscious matter exists and that consciousness is a kind of side effect of organizations of matter I think the position I defend Um Stands on reason and an empirical evidence. So I think it is a legitimate candidate For our next better Metaphysical narrative closer to truth. So what I have been doing for now since end 2016 is is Really going for the mainstream publishing mainstream philosophical journals mainstream scientific journals mainstream science Popular science journals like scientific american And engaging main mainstream people in in debates philosophers and scientists So that's the move I am making now In the early years, I tried to speak to the general public and I think to some extent I was successful But I grew more ambitious I think The case for metaphysical idealism is so strong that it deserves a very serious hearing in the mainstream. We just have to Overcome the inertia the momentum that we have going for materialism So so that we can Hear out the story of idealism in an unprecedented way Excellent, you know what that might be a really nice segue into kind of this Dissociative identity disorder thing that I wanted to talk about because it both Launches us into one possible Evidential element, but it also I think gives an example of how you're trying to engage who you're trying to engage with And how you're trying to engage with them. So I've put it up on the screen if anyone's watching and scientific american The title of this article that you co-authored could multiple personality disorder explain life The universe and everything So tell us about this Um, okay, there are three metaphysical alternatives There are many more with three main ones today one is materialism But it can't explain consciousness You cannot bridge the gap from mass charge momentum, etc To what it feels like to see red to have a bellyache or to fall in love That's the problem Then you have panpsychism which says that matter is inherently conscious So you don't need to explain conscious. It's it's a brute fact of nature Every electron is conscious every quark is conscious And now where macro level consciousness Is formed by the combination of these little micro level consciousness Consciousnesses of the subatomic particles in our brains Now that face is the so-called combination problem. There is no coherent way to explain at least in principle How uh subjectivities can combine to form compound subjectivities It's a problem just as hard as the hard problem Then the other alternative which is a form of idealism. It's the one I endorse Is that okay, there is only one universal consciousness So we don't need to combine anything, but then you face the decomposition problem I don't I I can't read your thoughts presumably you you can't read mine So how can we both be these one universal consciousness? That's where the associative identity disorder comes in Because this is a Empirically validated condition. We know it exists. We have brain imaging studies of people with this disorder We know they're not lying talk about that that in and of itself is going to be really significant for people and it is an example of What i'm talking about in terms of your engaging Science on their terms in their language in in this way Yeah, i'm not i'm originally a scientist too, even though I haven't been a professional scientist for for a while That's where I came from Well and talk about that for a second because yes, you are a scientist You're a professional scientist. He used to work at CERN and you're a phd in computer science And you have a very high level position or hardly regarded in that So you talk as a philosopher because you got a freaking phd in philosophy and all these amazing books But yeah, I mean you have the credentials scientifically, but explain to people this Imaging experiment that was done in germany Uh neuro imaging experiment. I think it's extremely important because we have to kind of spin back a little bit DID dissociative identity disorders split personality, you know The movies and all that stuff is still extremely controversial Among a lot of people who are in psychology psychiatry. They don't accept that there's any reality to it Some of that is based on this materialism that they're attached to or just they're not up to date on the research but The foundation of what you're talking about is Some of the science so please tell people about that clinical evidence for dissociative identity disorder, which used to be called multiple personality disorder And the idea is that one mind breaks up into many sub minds Uh clinical evidence for this goes back as far as you can look into the journals 1880s 140 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah late 19th century But a lot of people still felt skeptical. They thought well people are just Allying. They are just you know making this up to get attention But since at least 2014 that that doesn't hold anymore because of brain imaging research There there was one done in 2014 here in the Netherlands by Jolanda Schnoomf and others Which could identify the patterns of Brain activity that correlated with dissociative identity disorder And the controls were actors pretending to be dissociated and guess what the patterns of brain activity were completely different So there is something dissociative identity disorder looks like under a brain scanner So let's let's break down that experiment because it's kind of a cool experiment And then we'll get to the blind one in a minute because that's really just over the top But they they take they take two people one who claims that they have this Uh, what are the whole bunch of people who claim they have the idea And then they have the idea and they call it oh, so somebody claims they have an altar Just they call it an altar personality And that when they engage in this altar that they can't they speak a different language or they have a different accent just kind of organically They're not making enough different memories. So then what did they do in this experiment? I would tell them about the actor part It's so fascinating Yeah, so how do you control for that because you cannot just brain scan the people who who are diagnosed with DID You have to have a control But the control needs to act out DID so the experimenters don't know who is who So they hired actors and actresses To pretend that they have DID and act accordingly and they would go into the brain scan still acting So it's internalized acting. They try to think as though they really have DID And and the challenge was can we discern real DID from the actors and to cut the long story short? Yeah, man, they can clearly discern what parts of the brain according to what patterns of activation The people who claim to have DID present with and the actors present with something quite different So hold on this would be this would be almost sounds like a study designed by some skeptical organization Which we can't always dismiss everything they say out of hand But we can see where people would be skeptical of the skepticism that's overcome by that So next talk about the blind one because that kind of removes a lot of the criticisms that someone might have about the actors Yeah, that that that one is tough to to dismiss that was the year after 2015 in Germany um a woman Claimed to be several different altars different dissociated identities or personalities um And some of them some of these altars uh claim to be blind to not be able to see So they these two psychiatrists had this brilliant idea of just hooking this woman up to an EEG and take brain readings At different times when different altars were in control of her body at least that was the claim And when a sighted altar was in control, they could read normal brain brain activity patterns Here the back of the brain the visual cortex the area associated with vision and lo and behold when a blind altar was in control, even though the woman's eyes were wide open Activity in the visual cortex would disappear. No, that's something you cannot fake You cannot pretend that so because of of course there are critics of the conclusion that you just made and that maybe that study wasn't As solid as you think but just so we cover the basics And that is that the neural correlates of someone being blind Is not something that we think in our current model of consciousness, which is what your thing is all about I mean, I think what this forces the issue is Bernardo, I think you kind of force people the force choice Say, okay either you have to completely give up on your model of consciousness and suggest some other model of Consciousness not even your idealism thing just you have to come up with something because Straight up materialism. You don't have an explanation for how you could do this. So it's worse than that. I think The paper you just pulled up was my response. I mean that that that's even that's much more cross than to question the German study Somebody published an essay on the skeptical inquirer Criticizing my claim that multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder could help us make sense of the universe But it it was very obvious that the person didn't bother to read what I was writing because what the author of this Of this shame of an essay claimed is that What he understood I was claiming Or what he thought hallucinated I was claiming is that people who have Dissociative identity disorder can understand the universe better than you and me Now that was not at all the claim. I'm not claiming that you need to be psychiatrically diagnosed with the DID to understand the universe but the claim was that The condition called dissociative identity disorder Can give us hints to what happens to mind in order for for Different people not to be to read each other's thoughts. So to say Under the assumption that consciousness is only one field I spatially unbound field because that is the decomposition problem That's the problem we have to address and I address that by referring to this clinically and neuroscientifically confirmed condition In which one mind seemingly breaks up into multiple minds. It's it's such a powerful Phenomenon that you can become literally blind By it. So we know empirically that mind can dissociate into seemingly separate Psychic complexes so to say and that was the claim that the condition known in psychiatry as DID can help us address the problems of idealism or the challenges of idealism But my critic thought that I was claiming that only people who have DID can understand the universe I mean, he didn't even stop to read the very first paragraph of what I was writing. It's it was It was comical hilarious in a way Well, and again, you know, I'm gonna Try and cover that same point that you just made but maybe in a in a different way And if I do it incorrectly then and then you have to correct me but one of the things I think is interesting about multiple personality disorder DID disassociative identity disorder is that it suggests consciousness Really working in a completely different way than we previously understood that it could kind of self construct itself and in this splitting and forming these almost conscious entities for lack of a better term inside of our consciousness and Evidence of that which comes through like you said both clinically and then experimentally If you were just going to place a bet It would push you way against materialism and way towards idealism before you You know really broke it down completely like you do you just be like wow Well score another one for idealism because it just kind of fits better over there I I don't even think it's the best evidence against materialism It is certainly very handy to idealism because it allows the idealists to solve the decomposition problem Now look at the opposition the opposition has the hard problem of consciousness We have no idea how to even approach it let alone solve it And the subject combination problem, which we also have no idea how to even approach it So the third option has a empirically Consistent Avenue for tackling its own challenge challenge, which is a decomposition problem But if you want Evidence against materialism, there is better stuff than the sociative identity disorder Agreed agreed and you know what I'm really kind of leading you into Some different waters if you will because what caught my attention about the d id stuff was To the twofold aspect one it strikes another blow against materialism. It points out the inadequacies of psychology to really handle and fully fold in Like clinical work, which has been saying this for years and if they just deny it I think that's an important element of this But what it really struck me is i'm kind of barking up a different tree here and the tree that I was barking up Had to do with a rather amazing A bit of research that I found and I interviewed this guy if I can get him up on the screen And this guy's name is tom zinzer and he's a clinical psychologist from Grand Rapids, michigan now retired but was in the field for 20 25 years working with hundreds of patients and most of his patients had D i d dissociative identity and his work with those patients wound up Evolving into essentially spiritual work And he was finding that that separation those altars that were being created in their consciousness Were in fact real and had different kinds of relationships to other spiritual entities In the extended consciousness realm now That's a lot to take in I think from where you're coming at that there are some metaphysical speculations there that we might have to address But what I particularly Really appreciated about tom's work was that he was extremely meticulous and methodical as a clinician so he's preparing He's trying to develop a protocol He's transcribing all the information he's getting even if he's getting it from some spiritual realm He's trying to use it Then he's trying to apply it in the most efficacious way and he's presenting at conferences and talking to other clinicians and saying What are you finding does this work with you? He's not flying out there You know, he's not saying i'm some guru who's Sage on the stage, you know talking to god kind of thing and I just think there's a part of How this whole thing is going to move forward that is going to incorporate in one clinical work because of Some of the obstacles it comes over comes that The scientific lab work just is going to kind of grind on for years and years and and I think that there's something about There's some kind of pre scientific clinical opportunity that is tied to psychology That might be able to really advance this consciousness thing Down the field. So I know I kind of throw a lot on the table there But that's what I thought would be kind of interesting to chat with you about Oh, how do I comment on this? I don't know him. So I will be stepping on eggshells here because To subject. I'm not familiar with The baseline of what I'm saying of the position I put forward Is that what we call life organisms metabolism Is the image of dissociation in a spatially unbound Transpersonal consciousness. So when that's say that again, say that again, break that down for me. Okay Suppose that universal consciousness has something akin to DID So it also forms altars. What would an altar look like from the point of view of another altar? I would say it will look like what we call life A body a metabolizing organism From that perspective The baseline is All altars are visible because the image of an altar is a visible body If you're alive, you're dissociated when you die. You are reabsorbed into that spatially unbound transpersonal consciousness now The question that you're probably alluding to is Could there be dissociated altars of universal consciousness? That do not correlate with the physical body Hold on that isn't exactly what I'm talking about because you actually kind of pulled us into the water So you're just wrote a book on The metaphysics of young right young Ian metaphysics something along those lines, right? So young is talking about the shadow, right? Yeah, and he's open to the idea that As you know, and you're also Versed in many of the spiritual traditions So you understand the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the tulpa and that as we have thought forms those thoughts Exactly and those thought forms can become ego states slash altars the language becomes very Fluid there and that where it sounds like we're talking about the same thing. What is it? Aggregoria, you know same kind of thing thought forms ego states altars and in In particular with young, you know young is kind of playing both sides of the street too He's saying well, you know, I work with clients and we can kind of treat them just like they're separate But they're really not, you know, and then he switches on he goes. Yeah, but they are, you know, and he's kind of saying both So, right. Yeah I think if you study Jung's corpus Carefully I have done it. I like to think that I have studied it carefully three times over There is no doubt that Jung did think that certain dissociate dissociated Complexes of the self, which is his word for universal consciousness Could be disembodied that you could have a subject Um That is not correlated with the physical body There is no question that Jung thought that was possible Despite all his, you know tiptoeing and you know and then sort of contradicting himself When you go really deep into it, it's pretty clear that that's what he thought So from that perspective, uh, it aligns with the the thought forms of buddhism It even aligns with what some religious traditions would call this connect personalities Jung explicitly associated these Dissociated complexities He associated them with what in the tradition has been called the angels and demons Yes, and and therein lies. I think the the challenge because We go from philosophical idealism that you talk so eloquently about And then we go to the let's I that's why I love the clinical, you know Then let's jump to the clinical and talk about the experiences people are having And let's talk about it in as scientific way as we can pre scientific But scientific way as we can And now we have to look at that vast middle terrain that we have to traverse And it seems almost impossible. What's in there? Well angels are in there demons are in there Heaven is in there. Hell is in there. Uh, everything that we care about is in there And yet we just kind of bracket it and said well, that's all in the middle folks, you know You have your experience and then you have the one It's a legitimate point. I mean to to be fair to materialism The the german study with the woman who had blind altars It proves that the id is a Actual condition that people are not pretending. They're not making this stuff up But it doesn't necessarily in and of itself contradict materialism Because the materialist would say well, it is the end of neuro activity in the visual cortex That leads to blindness not the other way around You see it's not the condition that causes that causes the blindness It's some physical stuff in the brain that switches off the visual cortex and then the person presents as being blind Um, so that alone would not Destroy materialism, right, but we're not just I mean, we've already destroyed materialism In many other ways We're just trying to they're just trying to resurrect it because the problem with that logic is that if you follow it You get into this chicken and the egg problem, you know, which is what I always saw is ultimately the problem. Okay, so Mind can affect the physical body. Okay. Well Keep taking that back, you know In fact, taking that back and what is the origin of this? To to allude to Jung again. Jung has said very clearly multiple places in his corpus That it is the mind that creates the body not the other way around that it is the the psyche That creates its own Visible expression. Um, so the arrow of causation is from minds to biology not from biology to mind It's one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century and he was pretty clear about this despite He's seeing contradictions of himself depending on who he was talking to and at what point in his life And that might be an interesting topic to kind of just touch on because it's one of the things that We're chatting out at the chatting about at the beginning and that is this whole interplay between science and culture and who we trust and how even I guess how the most sophisticated people know how to Dance the dance and Jung appeared to do that And I think it's an interesting contrast between Jung and Freud because I would suggest that Freud ultimately didn't know how to do that because even though Freud is still You know to a lot of the general public is still kind of the the name brand Anyone who's looked into it said he's a cheater. He's a liar. He's not to be trusted because he just doesn't have that credibility Jung was able to Put forth a lot of very controversial ideas that are still still relevant and poignant and Meaningful and he was able to kind of do it without While while staying in the club He he he suffers some accusations of being a mystic. Um, uh, there are corners In the world of psychiatry psychology and even mainstream science Where people say well Jung was a mystic as if this this were an offense For them is an offense. So so they mean it and and as an offense Jung did try to walk a very very tight rope And and that lead that has led him to to say things that were Unavoidably religious clearly Clearly religious, but he would say that in scientific language And he distilled that to an art to an art form Uh, and that what are some of your favorite ones? Do any of your favorite ones come in? I would have to pick up One oh, can you give me a minute? Yeah, let me pick it up. Okay. Here's the book It will come out only next year. So you're having a A major preview here, but I have to find it now Ah here I found it Okay, this is what Jung wrote in answer to Job page 141 Since the archetypes in question are not mere objects of the personal human mind But are also autonomous factors. That is leaving subjects The differentiation of consciousness can be understood as the effect of the intervention of transcendentally conditioned Translation you are influenced by angels and demons that are real subjects independent of you So, I mean he dispute this ability to To write about his religious convictions, which he acquired through direct experience not through sermons Um To translate that into pretty neutral sounding scholarly sounding scientific language I find I find that brilliant. He was a genius in that I find that brilliant as well and I find that genius about your work as well Bernardo, even though you're not motivated by uh, a religious background of that sort I think that you're you're striving for something that we were really Feel like we all need and that's a solid intellectual Deep dive into these so so important topics. It's been awesome reconnecting with you. Tell folks What else is going on in your world? I don't know. I think there might be something major coming up But I don't know if you're ready to talk about that By now I'm ready because I've given notice already. I'm As most of you know, I have been in the high-tech industry for Well over 20 years now in different positions as a scientist Then as an entrepreneur and then as an executive for the past many years Um, I am leaving and that's now to focus exclusively on on philosophy And the neuroscience of consciousness and the foundations of quantum physics because all these things Their roots are the same. They are just different branches of the same problem that we are investigating So we are starting a new foundation Second half of this year. I will disclose details name websites Later on we need some a couple of months to sort of get it all going It is a it is a well-funded foundation. I'm doing this with my dearest friend Fred Matzer Who just released the film? I don't know whether you saw uh, beyond me. It's available for free. I think convenient We have been friends for several years now and we are Doing this together together with a bunch of other people as well whose names you probably would recognize immediately if I if I mentioned them But it is a serious push towards Um Making metaphysical idealism our mainstream narrative because we have every reason in the world To adopt it as the best option on the metaphysical table So we are getting pretty serious about that but very committed uh to that And this foundation will be our vehicle to try to achieve it within our lifetimes Well, that's fantastic and that really is big news. Um, just before we wrap up You mentioned the young book is coming out next year Where else people can of course go to metaphysical speculations to stay on top of what you're doing but is there anything in particular you wanted to direct people to that's uh Actually, I have another book that's coming out end of july or first of august in the u.s This one that you just saw is decoding young's metaphysics, but I have decoding schopenhauer's metaphysics Coming out the end of july. I think it's the 31st of july in europe the first of august in the u.s Where I discuss schopenhauer's idealist metaphysical ideas At length. I think we should Recognize schopenhauer as the father of the west of the west's native non-duality philosophy We have our own non dualism, you know The insights of a western man Who aligned so well with eastern non dualism as well, but he has been misunderstood and Outrageously misrepresented mainly in academia for several decades now And I think it's time we corrected that so we stopped saying that schopenhauer was a nut So we can see the wisdom and the coherence the logical coherence of what he was saying Which some of our arrogant academics could not discern because they were just not capable of understanding schopenhauer And they translated that into the accuser accusation that schopenhauer made no sense. That's just hubris I think it's time we we changed that Right out of the playbook if I don't understand it. I don't understand the idea attack the person Exactly fantastic Bernardo, it's just fantastic. We're we're cheering for you. We're hoping you can kind of Advance the ball down the field a little bit like you've already done so well It's been great having you on. Thanks again so much for being here. Thank you, Alex. Great pleasure to be here Thanks again to Bernardo for joining me today on skeptico Let me tee up a question from this interview, which I don't know it wasn't directly addressed But it's always looming in the background Bernardo has some great Wonderful idealistic no pun intended plans for breaking through the materialistic paradigm that science is locked into Do you think that has any chance? Or or put a percentage on it. What is the chance that that will happen in the next? I don't know 20 years I think it's very very close to zero But I'd love to hear your opinion on that Place to do it of course a skeptical forum Or you can always just drop me an email Love to hear from you. Love to hear what you're thinking about these days these crazy crazy days I have some great shows coming up. Stay with me for all of that until next time. Take care and bye for now