DSPod #206 - Foundational Reality of Minds - Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, Essentia Foundation

Embark on a thought-provoking journey into the realms of metaphysical idealism and artificial intelligence with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, a distinguished philosopher and computer engineer. In this engaging long-form conversation, we delve into the intricacies of consciousness, exploring topics from the philosophical nuances of writing to the cutting-edge possibilities of biomimetic design. Dr. Kastrup sheds light on the challenges of defining life and the origins of selfhood at the cellular level. Join us as we navigate the blurred lines between mind and body, dissect the significance of true parts, and challenge traditional notions of physical versus real. This intellectual odyssey offers profound insights into unitary consciousness, the nature of reality, and the profound interconnectedness of our existence. Whether you're a philosophy enthusiast, AI aficionado, or simply curious about the mysteries of consciousness, this conversation is sure to ignite your intellectual curiosity and leave you pondering the profound questions that shape our understanding of existence.

Bernardo Kastrup

But when it comes to my own writing, I write when the inspiration comes. And some days it's there. Other days I feel like doing something else I have to do.

Michael Shilo DeLay

That's really different than most people I've talked to, you know, because we've been just asking everybody who has written books like what their process is like. And that's, yeah, similar about that. So you just end up staying up for hours and hours sometimes and just writing for long stretches or...

Bernardo Kastrup

That can happen. Sometimes I can wake up at three in the morning with an idea ringing in my head and I have to write it. So I leave my bed, come up to the office, and then I write it. There are days I wake up and I don't feel like writing, so I don't. I do my work and sometimes I pursue a hobby and evening hours and there are days that something is just kicking my butt saying, you go write that. You've got to write that right now. You've got to do it. And and then there is hardly time to eat, to sleep. But I don't have a process. I don't have a routine. No, no. I'm always going with the flow.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Just sort of trust the muse.

Bernardo Kastrup

Yeah. And I know that for some people if they just go with the flow. They end up not doing anything. So they need a process. They need structure. I don't have that. That only happens when I need to do something that the diamond is not pushing me to do. When I have to do something that's not part of my my path, not part of my trajectory and something for some somebody else, for instance. And that happens regularly, of course. But when it has to do with, you know, what I'm supposed to be doing. Now, there's no structure, no process necessary.

Michael Shilo DeLay

What if you get struck by an idea in the middle of like a deadline for something else? You know, you running a foundation and you have something, some meeting in the morning or something, you know, you just give first priority to the work, to the bigger long term work, the book or you just let ideas go sometimes. How's that? Because I think that's the benefit of having like a routine or a structure is that you always make time for it and then, you know, that way it won't ever be in conflict with other things.

Bernardo Kastrup

I'm sure that's the right thing to do. That's not going to happen with me. You know, if that idea comes at three in the morning and it comes. With the right words, because the idea I can recover, but I may not be able to recover the words. So when it comes, like formed already. And I know that this is the bull's eye, this is how it has to be. Then I will leave my bed at three in the morning and I'll go do it even if I have a call or a meeting at eight in the morning and then I will not sleep. And then I sleep the next day or the day after that. But. And there are those days know lazy Saturday morning. If I just feel like sleeping out and I stay in bed until 12. That can happen as well.

Michael Shilo DeLay

I think it's the conserved idea is that you have to give it first priority like these really long term projects, whether it's you're willing to drop everything and tend to it because you have an idea or you schedule it and somewhere you have to put it first on the map or it'll just never, ever get done. If it's always getting swept away by the things of daily life will just never, ever happen.

Bernardo Kastrup

The risk of not getting a book done. It never happened. I mean, I never had that thought. The struggle is to listen too much. To the dying and neglect everything else to get it done. That's the risk. The risk that you will not get it done. It's impossible. I mean, I would not be left in peace. All kinds of crap will happen to me and my psychology will go down the drain. I start having anxiety, maybe physical issues. I will not be able to do anything else. It's like a hot iron ball that comes up through your exhaust. Because then you have to spit it out. So it's like you saying, the risk is that you never spit it out. No, that risk is not there. I think, I'm going to die if I don't spit it out.

Anastasia Bendebury

How much of your time do you spend reading?

Bernardo Kastrup  

Reading? Oh, I read a lot less than I used to. I think two books a month now, which is very little. I used to read a lot more papers. I still read science papers. Because they tend to be short and they have very compact language. Jargon has this benefit. If you don't know the jargon, it's a piece of crap. But if you know the jargon, Jargon is very helpful. Because one word can replace a  paragraph. So science paper tends to be like 5 to 8 pages, a lot of graphs. Sometimes equations very very condensed information that is much easier to go through than a tome. And I don't know why I've been reading less now except for technical papers.

Anastasia Bendebury

Is there a direct line between the reading that you do and the writing that you do? As we're working on this book, I'm finding myself at places where I realize that I haven't read enough on a certain subject. And then I have to set it aside and then go and read and dive into the history and figure out what these pieces are and how they relate to each other. And only then can I go to the next step and be like, okay, now I can tell the story effectively.

Bernardo Kastrup

I don't know why it is like this with me, but all this management that you're relating, all these strategies, the structure, what you do first, you know, the steps you take in order to be able to write. Somebody else takes care of that for me. I don't know what it is. I just call it the diamond. It's a metaphor, of course. I don't mean literally a spirit to looking over my shoulders, but to something deep in my mind that's not accessible through direct introspection. Does this stuff for me? So by the time that impulse comes to write the book. All the material I need Is already in there. I have already read that stuff, not because I was planning to write the book. But because I don't know. By the time I start, I will have read everything that I need in the process of writing. It has been like that 12 times now. So I think there's enough statistics to know if it happened the first time, if they got lucky, second time, really lucky, third time well, that's a lottery win with 12 times! No, never mind that. I'm probably dissociated from a part of my mind that's doing all this stuff that you're talking about without my ego awareness. You know, having access to it, being privy to it. So it's always been like that, even uncannily specific stuff. I'm keenly specific technical stuff and that I get interested in reading and I don't know why. I just get interested in reading. And then a year later, that's a linchpin in the book I'm going to write has happened many times.

Michael Shilo DeLay

And you don't have to go back to it or dig it up or try to reestablish your connection with that work?

Bernardo Kastrup

Usually I do after I have written the book. Just to make sure that I'm not misrepresenting or misremembering something, and that's part of the due diligence.

But that's easy. The book is written already, and then you go in and reread it and you check your sources and you check your citations, check your quotes. So I do that at that stage. But during the throes of writing the book? No. Every book is written. I never had to think about it. He just emerges. I don't think about chapter structure. I don't think about its title. Sometimes the title just comes, but I don't think about the structure. I don't think about. Yeah. I don't know.

Michael Shilo DeLay Do the chapters come out fully or, like, fully formed? Are they already structured to begin with?

Bernardo Kastrup

By the time I start writing, yes. But before, I'm even thinking about writing the book like the three years between 2020 and 2022. Those three years I was completely dedicated to essential foundation day and night. Now I'm like ten hours a day instead of 16. So it's a healthier balance now. But during those three years, I did nothing else. Oh, they didn't write. But I notice in hindsight that all these ideas that I'm writing this year in two books. They have grown in a quiet, structured. Why I was busy with those other things during the shower or in those moments when you wake up before you leave bed or when you sort of daydream during a meal? So that stuff was happening under the surface for for those three years.

Bernardo Kastrup

And then this year, because I had promised to my publisher and I deliver two manuscripts this year. When I set out to write the first, I'm just typing. I'm a typist. I'm not no longer. I mean, I'm not thinking about structure. It went so far this year that's the first book I wrote this year, which is ready it's in production. Actually production already started, but it would take another ten months to publication because of all the brick and mortar marketing you have to do to get shelf space and it takes ten months. But it went to the point that I wrote the entire book without thinking about chapters. I didn't write chapters, I didn't write Subchapter. I just wrote stream of consciousness. Then I came back and I sort of divided it in. Overall big chapters, nine of them that I could give a title to and the rest I gave it structure by leaving an empty line between two sets of paragraphs, just to give the reader a little bit of a clue. That something came to completion and then I'm going to start something else. But there are no subsections headings. I put chapters because it's required. I need to put a content page. So we need to structure it in chapters. But I didn't write it in chapters. Chapters was after the thing was written, I just figured out. Okay, how do I partition this? Where do I put a boundary? And I say, This is my chapter and this is the next. But if you read it when it's published, you will see that, chapter four is about Panpsychism. And Chapter five is about idealism, and chapter three is about physicalism. But if you read it, you will see that I talk about all three of them in every single chapter, and I go from one to the other. I go back as if I were talking to someone and I did it. Because that's how it came to me. And After 12 books, I have learned that, you don't fight the dimond. You know, what I mean.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Yeah, I was going to say, I wonder if that's a huge part of our problem is just it's our first book and we almost feel like we need to put every idea we've ever had into it for the last 30 years, essentially.

Bernardo Kastrup

That's a big mistake, right?

Michael Shilo DeLay

Right. I know. And so there's a lot of fighting that and just like having to recenter the focus and realize, like, this isn't our last book. It's just our first book.  

Bernardo Kastrup

Yeah, even if you have that mentality that you're giving your final word on the subject must be complete and it cannot have any sentence that you might like to rewrite later on. If that's your goal, you will never finish it.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Yeah, yeah. I think that's definitely something I feel like. I think I know that you struggle with that in particular.

Anastasia Bendebury

It's less that it's more that we set out to write this book about the physics. And then I realized that in order to tell the story of why this kind of perspective is important. And actually, it's kind of funny because the argument that we're making is that a materialist perspective is important. And the argument that I'm making is that the materialist perspective at some point in the recent past disappeared. And I had always pinned it to Michelson Morley or I was like, okay, Michelson MorleyThey find that there's no ether Einstein rises. And then we started talking to people and it became obvious that that was a much more complex and nuanced story than that. And so basically, in the process of writing this book, I had to go back and educate myself about this. So don't write something that's trivial, because I think that it's a much more complex story, and I think that it strikes at something that's very, very deep in the human psyche, which is this battle between materialism and spirit that has been with us since the earliest texts of the ancient Greeks. Like this is you go back to Pythagoras and he's like, the numbers.

Bernardo Kastrup

You go back to are many these. It's there too.

Anastasia Bendebury

And so it must be something that's even deeper. And so I feel like, this duality in minds that has persisted for as long as people have been writing their thoughts about nature. And so I didn't know about it. And in order to be able to write about it, I had to go figure it out. And that's what I've been taking most of my time to do because I'm like, there's so many people and they all interact in these delicate ways and you want to be able to trace the ways that their ideas are passed from person to person and how they mutate and the ways that people either take things on or abandon them or their spiritual callings that push them in one direction or another direction. It's a work of history.

Michael Shilo DeLay

It's like seeing the beautiful tapestry of how the society at the time shaped people's scientific inquiry. It's just absolutely mind bending.

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah, like I just think that I get really enamored with learning by reading the original texts and by looking at the history. And that draws me in. And so it's this constant battle to be like, okay, well, how much do I need from this in order to be able to generate the idea that is necessary to connect me to the next piece. And so it's very much a living process. It's not something that I'm like, I have figured all of this and I'm going to write this book. I'm like, Let's figure it out. And as we figure it out, write the book. 

Bernardo Kastrup

You know, I'm probably the worst person in the world to advise you in a process for writing, because I have none. But if I can contribute something to your thinking to be this. Pay attention to whether you are doing your research to give context to what you want to write or to give you what you want to write. In the latter case, you're not producing anything new. You're just rewarding. And if you find yourself doing that too much, you're off on the wrong turn. But if you have an original thing to communicate, but you need to couch it in historical or philosophic or scientific context, then yes. Then you should do a lot of reading. But there are a lot of authors out there and they know because I'm the publisher of Two Imprints. So a lot of manuscripts land on my desk, a lot of essays, land on my desk because I'm the chief editor of everything. It's Nature Foundation dust. You see often that people start with an original idea and then they get lost in their research and they begin to just reward and regurgitate what they write in their research. They lost themselves in that process. Very little original stuff comes through at the end. So that's what I would advise you to pay attention to. If you catch yourself, thinking that wrong turn, you will lose the muse. You will lose the original contribution, which is what the process is all about.

Michael Shilo DeLay

I've definitely felt that and discovered it on my own, too. I mean, the thing is, you go back to the history and you go back to reading other people's dialogs about some of these ideas, and then you've learned so much and you feel like you need to share that with the reader. But then it's just like, wait a second, I just read that so that I could actually, like hone my own ideas, not so that I could write a historic book necessarily.

Bernardo Kastrup

Exactly. And look, publishers these days, I see this a lot and I think every other publisher sees this as well.It's the life summary manuscript. We get it a lot. It's Somebody who made it to 60 something suffered a lot through life. Got a lot. Of punches knockouts learned throughout that. Then they come to a point, where they feel I have to share this learning of my life with everybody else. The problem is. Everybody will have their NOx, their bumps on their roads, their suffering. Everybody will go through that process firsthand. And that's what life is all about. Without that, we wouldn't need to leave. So. When you get to that. Point, then you feel tempted to just sort of edit From everything you've learned through your life. Those segments that were important to you because they were important to you, then we project ourselves to everybody else and we think, Oh, this is the key for everybody else. And he started this articulating, Look, he said this, he said that. The significance of that is for the one who went through their life in which those insights were meaningful. It's impossible to project that to the path of everybody else. So the content is extremely noble. People want to spare others of the suffering they had to go through.

Anastasia Bendebury

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Bernardo Kastrup

Unfortunately that's not how it works. Every life is original. Every life is a draft. What was significant for one is not significant for the other. So to publish, you need to contribute something original and not just do a sort of a digest of second hand literature. The segments that happened to have been important to you. And that doesn't justify it. There are hundreds of thousands of books published every year. Most of the people who would tell you, Oh, bananas, the soup is great. They haven't read a single book I wrote. They watch the videos. They watch an interviews like this. So they get those little pieces that they weave together with other stuff they heard elsewhere for themselves. That's how it usually works. So that's another thing, too. And I'm saying this not only to you, but whoever is listening. Think about that temptation when you get to your 60s that you want to do a digest of everything that was important to you, to share that with everybody else. It's not necessarily what everybody else will resonate with or will find meaningful or will find important. Often you get these little life digests that have enormous significance for the author and you let somebody else read it and they yawn at it. Why? Because every life is unique, every perspective is unique. And what resonates with one doesn't resonate with the other. What's important for one is not important for the other.

Michael Shilo DeLay

So now there are really successful autobiographies there. I mean, there are people who have stories to tell that are certainly valuable to large groups of readers. And it must be about the way that the people who write those narratives pull out meaning from the events that happened to them, rather than just the list of triumphs and failures, but have actually connected them in some relational fashion to something meaningful that can be universalized.

Bernardo Kastrup

When the life is fundamentally archetypal. In other words, when one lives a life that fits perfectly with that primordial template, that's what tends to resonate. Because the archetypes are shared. But most lives are bits and pieces of myriad different archetypes. You get a collage of all that is unique and which is our key contribution to nature, right? To just embody an archetype. I mean, nice, but. There isn't a reworking there. There isn't a new expression in that. It's something that was primordial from the beginning. What I think nature itself might resonate with are those collages, the lights that are collages of multiple archetypes. But those will not sell. Those will not resonate because those are unique. And that's the point. And I would call it individuation. That that's the point is the uniqueness of the individual and embodying multiple or all the archetypes if we can speak of it. But when one has a fundamentally archetypal life, like one month, when one embodies, the hero archetype. And that can lead to a bestseller. Because everybody recognizes something collective, shared and primordial in it. But most people who write their. Their. Life digest when they reach their 60s, it's not like that. It's a collage, which is good. You know, it's a good thing. Nobody needs to be. I mean, we don't need multiple Alexander the great. If you know what I mean. Maybe we didn't even need one.

Michael Shilo DeLay

That makes sense. It's really interesting to think about popular works as being archetypical and representing something archetypical.

Anastasia Bendebury

I thought about this in context. I thought about this in context of how difficult it is to write a book or a story that doesn't have a single hero. Like the main characters. So important. And I think that's because if you have multiple main characters through this lens, all of the sudden you're blending archetypes and the story isn't just the embodiment of the perfect form. It's suddenly this, you know, there's many it's a choose your own adventure and that's perhaps more childish and less certain than the fundamental preference that people have, which is for a story that they can just take in entirely and fit to some portion of their personality without having to do too much.

Michael Shilo DeLay

And everyone in the room can do that.

Bernardo Kastrup

Look, there are two types of books people feel like writing when they are in their 60s. One is their biography. And the other one is their life lessons. So I was talking about the life lessons part. That people think their lessons should be, the lessons that everybody else needs, and that's a mistake. But biographies can be even more archetypal. But biography is something different. We are interested in the biography when the life of that person produced an output that is meaningful to us for instance. I am very interested in Carl Jung's biography. Because Carl Jung's output as a scientist and a philosopher. Has been very meaningful to me. I appreciate his output, the originality and the significance of his output. You know, his ideas and what he produced irrespective of his particular life story. So because of what he produced, because of the originality of that and how significant they found that output. I became interested in how he got to that. How did he get there? How does a human being produce immense thoughts of that magnitude? How does that happen? That's why I became interested in his biography. So in the literary market, biographies that are meaningful to people. Biographies of other people whose output has been significant. You read the biography of Steve Jobs because he's output has been significant. He changed all of our lives. But very few people, we want to read the biography of your grandmother or my grandmother. Because even though their lives certainly weren't as significant, maybe more, maybe more deeply archetypal than. The life of Steve Jobs or Carl Jung. We we don't relate to the output, so I'm not telling you what I think is right or wrong and telling you what the reality of the literary market is.

Anastasia Bendebury

I don't think that it's a question of right or wrong. I think that it's a fascinating question of what is it that people resonate with and why they're some stories that appear to be universally valuable in a way that other stories are not. Where? On the face of it, you would think that the story of your grandmother would be particularly interesting because it's the story of your blood, of your history, of something to do with the way that you came up in the world and how you were formed and where you're headed. And yet Steve Jobs is still more compelling, maybe because everyone has aspirations to become Steve Jobs.

Bernardo Kastrup

It becomes Steve Jobs.

Anastasia Bendebury

Right. I mean, I understand that if you're in the world and you're doing things, it seems crazy to just remain one of the hoi polloi and resign yourself to the fact that you'll never be anything special. So there's the hope that, well, if I read these great works of this great person, perhaps I can understand where it is that they came from and find the essence that will allow me to also. Get to the top.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Well, that's why you go back to the biography, right?

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah, exactly.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Like you want to figure out the steps they took to become so powerful. But they have to be making something powerful in the first place for the biography to even be appealing even a little bit.

Bernardo Kastrup

You know, in the U.S., in your country, in your culture. There is a very prevalent conflation between being famous and being special. People mix these two things. It's not based on any logic. It's not based on any reason. If you think about it for 30s, they realize that these two things are completely unrelated. There's nothing about being special that requires being famous, and there is nothing about being famous that truly requires being more special than anybody else. Every person has a unique perspective, a unique life, a unique set of insights. So everybody is equally special. It's very difficult to make an argument that refutes what I just said. But thing whether your specialness is better known than the specialness of everybody else. That's something completely different and to some extent irrelevant. It will not change the critical things from the point of view of nature. Whether your particular special needs, your particular set of insights have been well known by many others in life. Because all of that will be in the mind of nature. Whether it has been known by other people in life or not.

Michael Shilo DeLay

So if there was anything, the specialness is that people value far and wide what you have contributed to society? It's something like that. I mean, you can be famous for murdering a cult or something. You could be famous for a lot of terrible reasons. I guess we would call that infamous. But generally speaking, it seems like people are famous because they're really competent, right? They're at the top of some hierarchy of performance operation.

Bernardo Kastrup

And wheel to power. And yeah, and in the U.S. especially, that gets conflated a lot with meaning. You know, the meaning of life is to be rich and famous. It's like, really! Think another 10s about this and come back tell me if you really believe this.

Anastasia Bendebury

And I think that in a country where there's no safety net, fame seems to be a stand in for security. Where it's the idea that you cannot fall through the cracks if so many eyes are on you and if so many eyes are on you, that means that it must be translating to financial success. And if you have financial success, then you can buy your way out of the teeming horrors of what it means to be poor and rural and...

Michael Shilo DeLay

Femmes of the new college degree. 

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah, exactly. But I do think that it's not accidental that the lack of safety net in America is also present in a country that is so obsessed with fame. Like I think that to relate to one another deeply in a way that most people don't realize.

Bernardo Kastrup

So there are psychological motivations for this, I understand. But if you think about what we mean by the terms success, meaning, specialness, fame and power. They're very different. There is very little overlap between them. We create these overlaps because of psychology, psychological reasons, like you mentioned. And that can lead to a lot of suffering because a lot of people think if they are not rich and famous, then their lives are meaningless from the point of view of nature. That couldn't be. Further from the truth, you know. And in Christianity and most other religions, you have this part of the religion in which people sort of retire from the world and go live in a monastery or go meditate on a mountain. And  they're not famous. Nobody sees them for 30 years. Except the local bear and the local birds and the monasticism. That's what I'm talking about. So the the monastic impulse in religions derived straight from the treaty of acquaintance with the reality. That it is. Your life that has value to nature, not how you project your inner life thoughts of other people while everybody's alive. In other words, a guy who nobody ever heard about, who has spent his life in a monastery praying and reading scripture and deriving all kinds of insights during six years in the monastery. You never saw him. You never heard of him. When he dies it will be as if he has never existed. That guy, from the point of view of the mind of nature is as significant as Michael Jackson. Maybe more. Because when those two in their lives are absorbed back into nature, it's irrelevant whether other people knew much about that during their lives or not. They are associated into the whole.

Michael Shilo DeLay

When you say the view of nature is that God. Is that the old concept of God? It just seems like you're reifying this concept of nature into some sort of actor. And that seems like a valid perspective from a spiritual point of view. I mean, there's God is a very popular idea still. Is it the same thing?

Bernardo Kastrup

I don't come at it from a spiritual perspective. You guys know I'm an idealist. I think that the nature of reality is mental. It's mind stuff I think. What nature is and spatially unbound field. Of subjectivity and the world we see are the excitations of that one field of subjectivity. So that dope deals nicely with grand unification theories and all that. But I think the feud is not a objective non-conscious feud. I think the field is a mind it is subjectivity. It is that whose excitations are experiences. The colors we see, the smells, the thoughts, the insights, the pain and so from. That perspective, human beings are dissociated segments of the mind of nature, like outer personalities. If nature has multiple personality disorder, we are the authors of nature and life is what that dissociation looks like biology metabolism is what a dissociative complex in the mind of nature looks like. We say that it is alive. In other words, it is dissociated and therefore the end of life is the end of the dissociation. So what is the end of the dissociation? It's the reabsorption of your inner life into the broader mind of nature that one few the subjectivity cultures throughout history have intuited this, even us. I mean, look at how we portrayed death the Grim Reaper. What is the instrument? The Grim Reaper carries. It's a harvesting. Instrument. Other cultures had the notion of sacrifice, which is a terrible morally. Absolutely reject whole notion. Because, you know, everybody's going to die anyway. You don't need to hurry that process. If you hurry, that process has left, you have less opportunities for learning. So sacrifice is abominable. But the intuition behind sacrifice is not, is it? That didn't come out of nowhere. The idea that you make a contribution to what you might call God by ending a life. It is not illogical. Because when you end the life, you end the dissociation. So you are gifting that person's memories and insights to the mind of God. That's when God can access that. It's when the dissociation ends, because while the dissociation is ongoing, there is a dissociative boundary preventing the mind of nature from accessing the contents of your inner life. So it's. Not completely gratuitous. It is abominable and 100% unnecessary. Because we are all going to die anyway. But it's not illogical. It didn't come out of music.

Michael Shilo DeLay

There's something practical to it, too, like this. This idea that constantly throughout your life you have to give up things in order to get things to make a future better, you might have to, you know, forestall whatever immediate pleasures you might receive had you not done the long term efforts to move yourself towards a future. I feel like there's something deeply human about that process that is celebrated and the idea of sacrifice as well, like its sacrifice, is fundamentally about giving up something that you love, right? That's what makes it a sacrifice. It's not just you give up something that you didn't really care about. You have to give up. You have to make these trades almost.

Anastasia Bendebury

I am not sure that I think that in a lot of societies, sacrifices were like people captured in battle and stuff like that. I just I think that there's probably I mean, there's the Judeo Christian.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Even if you just go with like the Judeo Christian tradition of sacrificing animals, let's say right now, the old temple sacrifices, these were valuable, right? These were things that you wouldn't want to burn. Right. Otherwise, there's life sustaining.

Bernardo Kastrup

Well, there are two origins for the notion of sacrifice. One is, I'm going to surrender to the divinity that which is dearest to me and that you see a lot in Christianity for instance. And yeah, in the Bible you have that in the Old Testament.

Michael Shilo DeLay

You know, and the New Testament, God's only son being sacrificed, you know.

Bernardo Kastrup

In that to, that to. Another notion of sacrifice is, when you sacrifice, so to fulfill a need of the divinity. So that's what you had in Egypt. And when you sacrifice, you're giving God something God needs. And you see that in other cultures as well. So what I mentioned, that notion of sacrifice of a life. Because of you know, the inner life of the being sacrificed, becoming available to the mind of nature. That notion attaches to this second idea of sacrifice that you sacrifice in order to give God what God needs. Or to give the dead what the dead need. And like this was done in Egypt when somebody very important would die. He would sacrifice his household stuff. Because he might need that stuff in the afterlife. Or you would sacrifice their pets. Because they might need the pets in the afterlife, or you would provide food, which is sacrifice that food your tribe is not going to eat, but the dead might need that food in the afterlife. And the same applies to God. You're giving God something that God needs. That second notion of sacrifice, I think has a logical root. It's just that, it's morally abominable and absolutely unnecessary. But there is a logical route to that. It's not completely arbitrary. It didn't come out of nowhere. And our depiction of the Grim Reaper. Also didn't come out of nowhere. You know, just think about it. It could be carrying anything. It could be carrying a sword. It could be, you know, carrying some weapon. But no. He cares a harvesting instrument. Do you know that things?

Anastasia Bendebury

Do you know the origins of how he came to do that?

Bernardo Kastrup

Of how the image has arose and arisen in our collective psyche. I don't know. I'm not sure there is established scholarship on that.

Anastasia Bendebury

I'm just saying I mean, the site makes a lot of sense as the instrument of death because that's the pastoral end of the season. Everything goes away after the winter comes, after the harvest is gathered, it becomes cold. The trees die like it seems to represent the closing of prosperity and the moment of judgment. Like if you think about what happens if your harvest isn't good enough, you won't make it through the winter.

Bernardo Kastrup

That's one way to look at it. I don't share that view. Because we don't harvest. The fields to go hungry. We harvest the fields in order to collect the debt, which is critical for our sustenance. That's why we have that harvesting instrument. To harvest things that we want that we need in order to live and do whatever it is that we do. So I think that choice of instrument is telling. I don't think it's some vague symbolism related to fall in winter? No, I think. It's very specific. You know, you're portraying the Grim Reaper at that which will kill you, that which will end your life. Why doesn't he carry a narrow, a spear, a knife, a sword? No. He carries a safe. We're think and a very low cost. I mean, he can cut off your feet, but it's hard to see how he's going to kill you with that thing.

Michael Shilo DeLay

So there's like a recycling elements of that. The hardest element.

Bernardo Kastrup

You know, I think it's more than that. I think it's when you bank your games. Nature banks it's games with that. That's when metacognitive content, the insights, the memories of our human life are banked cash in by nature. Because up until your death, those insights are own yours. Then they are not to benefiting nature at large. But when you die, which is the end of your dissociation, not they are banked. Now they become available in a much broader. Spatially unbound cognitive context. I mean, I'm speaking from the point of view of analytic idealism. So if you are a materialist, of course, you would think that everything I'm saying is senseless because under materialism. When you die, your mental contents disappear. They don't become integrated into the rest of nature. They just disappear. So everything I'm saying makes no sense under that physicalism. But I mean, what about the fact.

Michael Shilo DeLay

That they get integrated by your works while you're alive and your interactions and the ideas that you put on the table in a public sense? Because it seems.

Bernardo Kastrup

There's value to that. Because you will be sort of. You'll be nurturing other people's insights as well. So you're multiplying your effect.

Michael Shilo DeLay

And that seems natural to me, like that seems in accordance with human nature. It was such a social entity and there's something really natural about writing books or being a teacher or doctor or anything where you're actually out there, you know, a plumber fixing people's stff. You're contributing. You're like interacting in this way that you are in some sense disseminating all of your experience into the world.

Anastasia Bendebury

To some degree. But I think that there's also a very long tradition of people who leave society and pursue these monastic lifestyles. Like I think that this is something that runs in parallel always where there are the people that are of the world and they're the people that are of the spirit. And I think that this is something that we really I personally struggle with as a biologist, because when you get down to the question of what is life, it's very, very hard to simply leave it at the physical. It's just chemistry bumping up into itself. And all of nature's just molecules. It leaves. It doesn't account for will and desire. And so if we're going to account for will and desire and choice, Do you believe in choice? I don't remember.

Bernardo Kastrup

We make choices every day.

Anastasia Bendebury

Do you believe in fate? Do you believe in, like, the ability? I hate to use free will, but do you believe in free will?

Bernardo Kastrup

I think it's a red herring. I think the concept does not have a clear meaning. It's internally contradictory. It's pointing at something for which there is no semantics. In other words, it doesn't mean anything. So I'm not denying it. Neither am I affirming it. I'm saying that the point is meaningless. It's like you asked me, is the number five married or single? And you demanded that I either say it's married or it's single.

Anastasia Bendebury

It's obviously single.

Bernardo Kastrup

I say it's single. Then you say, well, therefore, it's not married. And what I'm telling you is that's not a question to have. That doesn't make sense. It's a category a mistake. The appeal to free will. It's an appeal to semantic space in between the termination and randomness. My point is, there is no such semantic space. Things are either determined or they are random. And even randomness. May be a purely epistemic concept. In other words, things are random. If we can't identify the patterns they follow, it does mean that they are unfolding according to no pattern. It means that these monkeys here cannot figure out what the pattern is, and that's all there is to it. So at the end of the day, you're left with determination. But if I say I am a determinist, I would be lying because I don't think our choices are determined by brain activity. I think brain activity is what our choices look like. When they are observed from across our dissociative boundary. But I think our choices are determined by what we are. We choose what we choose. Because we are what we are and who we can't be otherwise. Free will is a red herring. And you see that immediately. If I tell you that if we had true libertarian free will, we would all each one of us be. Maximally happy because we would simply choose to, we'll. Whatever the circumstances of our lives happened to be. If you are serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, you will choose the debt exactly what you want, and you'll be extremely happy in solitary confinement. But we are not free to will. We are free to act according to the will. But the will is determined by what we are and we can't be other than what we are. So what is this business of free will?

Michael Shilo DeLay

Yeah, what about people that are making really bad choices? Would you offer them any? Like, could you coach someone out of making bad choices? Or do you think that who they are has fundamentally determined that and there's just no way back?

Bernardo Kastrup

No. Look.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Can we learn to make good choices?

Bernardo Kastrup

Yes. Because think of a computer system. I mean, I'm a computer engineer too. So that's my favorite method for. A computer can have many chips like a look at this. Yeah. Lots of chips in there. Do you see?

Anastasia Bendebury

What is it?

Bernardo Kastrup

Multiple sizes.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Is that a computer?

Bernardo Kastrup

Stop shifting there. This is a mini computer. I designed didactic mini Computer to help people teach computer engineering. Each one of those little black things is a chip. And they all operate deterministically. But they require inputs to produce their deterministic outputs. If the inputs change, they produce other outputs. So this communication of inputs and outputs is essential for it for a deterministic system to work. So when you say, if somebody always makes bad choices, can you coach this person to make good choices? What does that mean to coach that person? It means providing new inputs to that person, which will lead to different outputs. So, yes. In under terminic world, we can learn, we can change, we can evolve, we can improve, we can make choices. Determinism doesn't contradict any of this. All that it says is that everything that happens is ultimately determined by what nature is. And nature can't be other than what it is. That's all there is to it. But all the inputs and outputs of the play of choice is being made. That's part of it. And my choices are determined by what I am, given the inputs they receive. Those inputs change. My choices can change.

Michael Shilo DeLay

And you can orient yourself towards different inputs. That's the very bizarre thing about being a life form versus a computer. Do you think they computers have the ability to tune into this distributed conscious field system that you speak of?

Bernardo Kastrup

They are it. They are not outside of it. They don't need to tune in to it. They are a particular pattern of excitation of this one on their line feud. The question is, do they have private conscious in their life in the way you and I have? I don't think they do because I don't think silicon and oxides are what dissociation in the mind of nature looks like. I think what's dissociation in the mind of nature looks like is metabolism, transcription, protein folding, ATP burning, all tha good stuff that allows. Us to recognize life in all its variety as one phenomenon distinct from everything else. So I don't think computers have private computers in their life, but computers are a representation of certain patterns of excitation in the mind of nature, because. What else could they be under analytic idealism? They do represent mental activity in the mind of nature, just not private mental activity.

Michael Shilo DeLay

And you feel like there's no threat that will ever happen at any points. You know, there's obviously the popular catastrophizing that the A.I. overlords are coming to, you know, scheme against the humans.

Bernardo Kastrup

And look, there is a danger and has nothing to do with computers have having private conscious in their life. A.I. computers are very powerful tools. Nuclear power stations are very powerful tools. They can go wrong. And we should take safety measures to prevent catastrophe when they go wrong. When we don't, things do go wrong. Chernobyl, Fukushima, I think, is just like a nuclear power station. A very, very powerful, very complicated system that requires safety measures, safeguards, and that is completely independent of whether eyes are also artificially conscious. I don't think they would ever be. Do I think that humans, if one, they could create artificial, private conscious in their life? Yes, I think we can. I think we will. I don't think it's even far away. But it will look like a cell. It will the quest for artificial private conscious in their life is the quest for abiogenesis. It is the quest for the creation of life from non-life. Will we succeed? I think there is every reason to think we will. And when we do, it will. Look like an amiba. And one day it may look like a monkey. But. It would still be artificial. And it will have private conscious in their life. We will have learned how to artificially induce dissociation in the mind of nature, just like nature did it spontaneously to create us.

Anastasia Bendebury

If you place metabolism at the heart of the formation of a private inner life and metabolism inside of a cell is basically just power generation. It's combustion, It's you take sugars and you pass them across a series of breakdown steps and get out carbon dioxide and water you're burning.

Bernardo Kastrup

It's also growth replication and morphogenesis, right? You don't get any of these things without metabolism.

Anastasia Bendebury

Of course. And so it's the foundation of it is a power supply inside of a computer. Not just that. And so if you have the structures that live on top of it that tell it to make more power supplies and to send out machines that builds power stations and harvest the sun or harvest the winds like is that not aspirational towards the same kind of metabolic processes that life has, but just in silico? Because I agree. I agree with you about there being something fundamentally biological about consciousness. And so if we were to create life, that it would be soft and squishy the way that we are. But I also sometimes can see the parallels to that inside of an artificial computer system.

Bernardo Kastrup

Of course, look, we can abstract our way up until we are completely detached from substrate. And then we find this echoes of certain things on other things.  And people do that all the time when it comes to scientific theories and their models of nature are abstractions. You are sort of making them all those independent of the concrete embodiment in a substrate. You're transferring all of those dynamics to mathematical equations. But when it comes to. Listening to what nature's telling us, because that's what science does. We're looking at what nature's telling us. When it comes to consciousness, we make a mistake that we don't make anywhere else. For instance. I can scientifically abstract kidney function into mathematical equations. And then I can run those mathematical equations that model kidney function on my iMac right now in front of me. And I can run that model with such a degree of molecular level accuracy that it to have a complete isomorphicism with an actual kidney yet. Nobody would expect that on that account alone, my computer will urinate on my desk because we know that isomorphism is conceptual. It exists in a level of abstraction. It doesn't translate back to the concreteness of the kidney. And a computer simulate kidney function is not going to pee on my desk. Even if the simulation is accurate, down to the molecular level such that there is a complete isomorphic and with a real kidney. What's the difference? Well, the difference is the substrate. In one case, it's silicon and oxides. In the other case it's carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen and no actual kidney function. One is isomorphism to the other without being the other. You cannot transport all the implications of one to the other in the kidney function implies urine. In a computer it doesn't. So we understand that when it comes to urine, but when it comes to private conscious in their life, because we are so confused about consciousness, we forget that. And now we say, if I simulate the patterns of information flow and integration in the human brain, my computer, low and behold, my computer will be conscious. It's exactly the same thing as saying that my computer. Will be if I run an accurate simulation of kidney function in it.

Anastasia Bendebury

So that's I totally agree. And it immediately makes me think of the actual parallel, which is that if what kidneys do is they filter the blood and they remove things that are waste and need to be discarded. And so urine is the byproduct of that waste and so if someone designs a computer system and they use the biological principles of kidney function in order to process data to remove corrupt files or I don't know enough about computers to be able to really extend this matter.

Bernardo Kastrup

It's called garbage collection.

Anastasia Bendebury

So if you write a program that does garbage collection inside of the computer on the same functionality principles as the kidney, but recognizes the limitations of it, can you not incrementally put together systems that are inspired by biology but rendered in context of a computer system in such a way that they actually do make sense and you're not expecting it to urinate on your desk, but you are expecting that there's going to be a collection of garbage that it puts out that you can then throw.

Bernardo Kastrup

And we can enforce all kinds of isomorphism correspondences a form between the way computers work and living beings work. But this correspondences of form, do not imply that the computer will have private conscious in their life, just that it doesn't imply the computer will urinate. So we can go and, you know, go off to the races in making this isomorphism solution for synthesized amorphous. And we still will not have any more or less reason to think that the computer suddenly has private conscious in their life the way you and I have. Why? Because nature is telling us that, all natural instantiation is of things that seem to have private conscious in their life. All share this microscopic level process that we call metabolism. I couldn't be more different than an amiba, but if you look at both me and the amiba under a microscope. Damn, we are identical. You're doing the same thing. That's what's nature's telling us, that when there are beings that identical to us at a microscopic level exhibiting behaviors. That in our case are motivated by private conscious in their life. We are very well motivated to say that they too have private conscious in their life. Because their behaviors are the same. And their function and structure is the same. It's not analogous, it is the same, metabolism is the same. They are all doing protein folding, they are all doing ATP and they are all doing the same thing. But when you take a computer. And you say at a certain level of abstraction, there is a nice amorphous. And their behavior is the same, then you're making two mistakes. You're forgetting that the behavior is the same because we made it be the same. It's an imitation. That's why it's the same. It's not because it's naturally exhibiting that behavior spontaneously. Like a cat exhibits behaviors analogous to mine. No, it's the same behavior. Because it was engineered to be the same. And we don't think that a shop widow mannequin. Is conscious just because it looks like a human being, because we know it was built to look like a human being. It was an imitation. So the rest of the implications don't apply. So that's one mistake. And the other mistake is to take an isomorphism for an identity. It's to take the isomorphism is more of a computer function . Is at a certain level of abstraction with an identity. And I think both are unjustified. I think there is nothing nature telling us that however much isomorphism comes with built into silicone and oxide construct. Did that will on that account alone have conscious in their life the way you and I have? I think we have no reason to believe that. And how could it be the case? It could. Look, I cannot eliminate the possibility. I cannot prove that it cannot be. But there are millions of silly things we cannot disprove. I cannot disprove the flying spaghetti monster. There may be a monster in the higher dimension using its noodle appendages to move the planets around the sun. Goodness knows the evidence is consistent with it. The planets do. Move around the sun, and I cannot disprove the flying spaghetti monster. Because gravity is invisible. It's a model. The twists and turns of the fabric of space time also largely invisible. Maybe there is a flying spaghetti monster. I cannot disprove it. But I can make a very strong argument that we do not need to spend time contemplating the hypothesis. So I would submit that in the same way. We do not have good reason to spend time contemplating the hypothesis. Of artificial private consciousness in silicon. But in a biogenesis, now, we would be well grounded to say that an artificial life form that metabolizes will have private conscious in their life of its own. And then all the moral stuff, you know, all the ethics stuff applies.

Anastasia Bendebury

I think that the limitation here is that most of the people that we've spoken to that are working on developing artificial consciousness inside of computers would not say that the amiba is conscious. And so we run into this all the time. We'll talk to people that are working on A.I. and they're like, you know, I don't know that my cat is conscious. I don't know that the amiba is conscious and it seems to be the root cause of all of the tension, like you're saying, which is a deep misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness that is this somehow disembodied. And appears suddenly some place in evolution, just like pops into being. And suddenly you have consciousness. Whereas before you didn't. And I viscerally agree that if we're going to be talking about consciousness, we can't talk about it as being somehow distinct from the simplest life forms.

Bernardo Kastrup

We can't. It leads us down an extremely slippery moral slope. The moment you start denying the private consciousnesses of other living beings. Is the moment when catastrophe is just around the corner. It's the moment when you start killing, torturing because you know, nothing suffering there. So I think every fiber of intuition in us as products of nature staling us that all living beings are conscious all living beings suffer and are capable of pain and to deny that. I think it's morally deplorable and extraordinarily dangerous. Let's go back to the Nazis thinking that Slavs are inferior beings and therefore in a sense not really conscious like us and the Jews. And look at what happens when you start entertaining that thought. Now, have you ever noticed that most A.I. researchers are men? The vast majority. I think it's not tongue in cheek what I'm about to tell you and I'm serious about it. And women are able. They are capable of doing something miraculous that men are not. Women are capable of creating new life. And although men have some participation in that business. It's a very minor participation. And what creates new life? From a cell to a walking, breathing, talking, living human is women. That's a miraculous capacity. That men don't have. Now, Freud used to talk about penis envy, which is women being envious of this extra organic part. That men have, and they don't. I submit to you that there is womb envy, which is man's desperate need to be able to perform. This same miracle that women perform. But they can't. So they tell themselves the torture is conceptually deranged story about the nature of life and consciousness that allows them to entertain the fantasy that they too can bring privately conscious life into this world. They can be mothers too. And that need is extraordinarily powerful and it will overwhelm any sense of reason and logic. And it will. Lead people to say that, well, cats are not conscious. And it's something I get when I organize my logic gates just in the right way. Because it opens the door to a belief that it satisfies that unfulfilled need. The need to create consciousness out of to create privately conscious life out of something that wasn't it. Before that divine godly power that women have and men don't. And so I submit to you that this is what's going on, other than the fact. That it's just silly. That's the thinking behind it is. Just flat out silly. It's equivalent to saying that my computer will pull my desk if I make an accurate enough simulation of kidney function beyond that. You know, we don't do silly things just because we are silly creatures. Now we do silly things because we have these powerful emotional motivations that we deny.

Michael Shilo DeLay

We haven't heard to the computer up to your, you know, bladder yet, I guess is what it comes down to. It's feeding it like you haven't hooked up that computer program to your bladder. And I think that's where things are headed is, as I imagine, a future that's very bionic, where people are sort of jacked into these programs. And so at some sense, the computer is actually tethered into the squishy world and now it does have the ability to act out. It can be on your desk if it wants to, I guess.

Bernardo Kastrup

You know the bionic part? It's old news. Look at this, oh, no, I can't see it. I am bionic. Yeah. Over my phone. I can communicate with my computer. Look, I can see you right now. You're on the other side of the Atlantic in nine hours, nine time zones away from me and here we are talking life to one another. We are already bionic. But this doesn't mean the private conscious in their life somehow arises from essentially the sand that's used to make my computer or the thought experiment mirrors that I used to make my glasses.

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah, exactly like the thought experiment. Those to say, All right. Well, so if you rapture all of the humans and the silicon is left inert upon the planet, what happens? Nothing. It just decays and follows the rules of nature. Because there's nothing within it, even with the capabilities of AI that we have right now, where it would then continue to generate itself. And I think that the fantasy, like you're saying this womb envy drives people to believe that they are creating systems that in the absence of humans would still function in the same vein and in the same principles here.

Bernardo Kastrup

I would disagree with you, perhaps surprisingly to you. I think all structure and function in principle can be created mechanically or electromechanical. So I think there is nothing in principle that precludes the hypothesis of A.I. which are not privately conscious. But have a certain structure inserting function. Nothing in principle precludes the possibility that they could self regenerate and procreate. If you could have machines that are capable of creating other machines. Because all of this talk is talk of structure and function, none of it requires or implies private conscious in their life. But I think it is in principle coherent to think that a species like us could create AI and seed another uninhabited planet with it in such a way that they would carry on and continue to reproduce and generate more instances of themselves. Maybe even evolve perform all kinds of tasks and have essentially a civilization that does not have private consciousness. I think that is conceivable because we know from complexity science that. Even very simple rules can lead to very complex behaviors that we associate with life. Just look at cellular Automata and Conway's game of life. Two very simple rules and you get all kinds of lifelike processes going on. So I don't think that is in principle impossible. I think where we go wrong is to believe that the computer can be on the desk. In other words, is to think that. Because we imitate the patterns of information processing in the human brain and a silicon substrate, that silicon substrate, just like us, should also have private conscious in their life. We have no reason to believe that none whatsoever, because there is nothing more different. Now, if I take a brain and I take my mini computer that I just showed you. And I'm going to store every chip on that computer to expose that a section and lateral section of that chip. And I'm going to put all of those smart. Chips on the table next to a brain that I put on the table. It is obvious that they are two completely different things. Yes, there are isomorphic sense between the two with a certain level of. Conceptual abstraction, but that doesn't eliminate the pungent, concrete, undeniable fact that the computer and the brain completely different things. So why do we insisting thinking that the computer should have private conscious in their life, just as the brain seems to have? There is no reason for that. They are totally different. A computer operates by moving electrical charges in metal traces. That are gated by Silicon Gate. A brain processes information by releasing neurotransmitter transmitters synaptic clefts. And the energy is produced by ATP burning. I mean, these are completely different things. But because we are so driven to to carving out space for the belief that we men too can create life. That we abandon logic, we hang logic at the door, and we proceed to entertain fantasies.

Anastasia Bendebury

I think that it's easy to entertain the fantasy because people don't have a good sense of what is life and what is conscious. It's like when we talk, when we have these debates, it seems like that's where it comes down to that. If you don't have a solid understanding of consciousness and you operate under the idea that it is something distinct from the substrate of life or the manifestation of life, then you can develop these fantasies that you will program your computers to be able to do that because it's indistinguishable and your computer will be, it will have a bladder reservoir and it will have fake blood and it will be able to pee on your desk. And so because it can pee on your desk because of the thing that you have engineered into it, it is one in the same since it's running the software that's modeled on the principles upon which a brain works.

Bernardo Kastrup

If we have a naive limited understanding of what's going on, then of course, we artificially create room for these fantasies because our understanding fails Richard Feynman wrote about it. He wrote about cargo cults. We know what that is.

Anastasia Bendebury

But maybe somebody...

Bernardo Kastrup

Just for the sake of it, just ready. So in the pacific during the Second World War, the Americans established several airstrips, airplane bases on several pacific islands during the war against Japan. And the natives of those islands, they had never seen technology before and suddenly they see this things with wings that fly. And when they come back and they land. They have cargo. Because the Americans also distributed food and trinkets to the natives to make them happy. So they started thinking, oh, these things with wings, they come from the gods. And when they landing here, we get goods. So when the war was over and the Americans went away, the natives started creating airstrips themselves and replicating the form of the airplanes with wood and straws. They even created this. This control towers out of wood, bamboo, whatever they used. So the form was all recreated. And they did that in the hope that then they would. Get the cargo, they would get the food they would get the trinkets. Why did they do that? Because they have it. They had a naive, incomplete theory of how this stuff was working. They thought that the form alone could account for the function. They didn't understand that there was a lot of thing, a lot of stuff going on under the hood that enabled what was going on. Air is the same thing. We have a very naive, very silly understanding of the nature of reality, the nature of consciousness, which. Creates this gaping gaps in our models of reality. And we believe that form translates to function. We entertain cargo cults, and we think that if I imitate the form of information processing and integration in the human brain, if I imitate that in silicon, that I will get the consciousness. That's like imitating the form of the airplane with straw and hoping that you get the cargo. It's entirely analogous. It's exactly the same thing.

Michael Shilo DeLay

And is all the complexity which makes life so difficult for people to define because it's really strange that, you know, a child can tell whether something is alive or not. It's a very natural intuition for people to know when something is alive versus when it isn't. And yet there seems to be no real good, consistently used definition of life. There's like lists of qualities, but in terms of what actually defines something that's living, it seems to be this. You know, constantly receding.

Bernardo Kastrup

It's because we want to create some form of abstraction. Life is extraordinarily easy to identify. It's the only thing that burns ATP. This transcription and protein folding. It's incredibly easy to identify. Now we can see where viruses, they don't really metabolize, but they come close. Okay. There can be a discussion there. But that's a discussion about a tiny interface. By and large, we know exactly. What's alive and what's not. The problem is we try to abstract away from the concreteness that nature is giving us. We're trying to abstract some conceptual framework that is more generic than metabolism. And they start talking about, well. If it grows and reproduces, then it's living well. Okay, then a cellular automata has living beings. That's just silly is just silly. Because we know exactly what's going on in a cellular automata. You know exactly what microscopic Silicon Gates are opening and closing according to what rules. But we keep on insisting on finding some abstraction that raises the idea of life spiritually beyond the wetness and the concreteness and the warmness of the warmth of of a metabolism. There is no difficulty at all about identifying life. It metabolizes metabolism is unique. Nothing else in nature metabolizes. And all life metabolizes. That is it. Why do we need more? If we want to really abstract in philosophical terms, then we can start talking about the unified plan of Morphogenesis. And which is something we haven't understood yet. We cannot reduce that to molecular level processes. 

Anastasia Bendebury

Can you elaborate on that? I'm not familiar with that.

Bernardo Kastrup

Well, how does when we grow cells. Specialize depending on where they are, in which part of the embryo. Some cells become your brain. Other cells become your tool or their cells become your liver, and they know exactly what to become and what to do. Depending on where they are in the global unified plan of a living body. Now, we do not have yet a complete satisfying bottom up model of morphogenesis based on molecular first principles. It doesn't exist. And the more we look at it, the more we get lost in it and fight them about complexity in the signaling. That is going on. So if you want to have some satisfying philosophical abstraction, we can speak of life being associated with whatever gives rise and enables morphogenesis. Whatever enables this sort of is a global blueprint that allows us to go from bricks to Cologne's cathedral. Because you know what DNA does? It produces proteins. Proteins are bricks. But how do you arrange those bricks together to live to lead to a human being? How do you arrange the bricks together to lead to Cologne's cathedral? We don't quite understand that. But whatever it is, it seems to be intimately associated with the life. Because real bricks don't come together to form Cologne's cathedral as it needs humans to put them together that way. But when it comes to life, that organization comes from the inside out. Somehow, living organisms know where to put the bricks in just the right way. And we call it growth. So you could associate life with something at that level to give people some kind of warm fuzzy, philosophical, satisfying philosophical abstraction. But I submit to you, we don't need it. We know exactly what metabolizes and what doesn't. Metabolism is the thing that unifies all life in all. Its vastly different forms at the microscopic level, everything metabolizes. And yes, viruses don't. So in my book, they are not living. They do not have private conscious in their life. We create the difficulty out of our philosophical prejudices and psychological needs. There is no difficulty there. Life is we told you what life is.

Michael Shilo DeLay

What do you make about scaling up life forms? So obviously where each these cities of different cells and, you know, there's a case to be made that each cell has its own goals and and, you know, the reason that large organisms even evolved is because there was some collaboration necessary between of the little pieces which worked out good for everybody. Something like that. What about, like, do you entertain the guy in perspective that the planet itself could be a giant organism in some community of other planets and do you think that it's a waste of time to contemplate these larger scale beings that might not operate on this same cellular program that we're used to?

Bernardo Kastrup

No, I don't think so. What one is appealing to is some kind of solution to the combination problem. How fundamentally disjoint subjects of experience can somehow merge together into a higher level subject subject of experience. There are good philosophical reasons to say that these very idea is incoherent in principle. Not to mention the fact that there is absolutely zero empirical evidence for such a thing ever happening. No multicellular organisms comes to this earth by having individual cells crawl towards one another and pile on top of one another.

Anastasia Bendebury

That's not that. That's actually not true.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Just go ahead and tell me.

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah. So there's these crazy slime molds that have individual single celled periods of their life. And then at some point, when I think it's nutrient starvation triggers a multicellular program where they come together, they form a multicellular stock and only some fraction of the spores on the end of the stock.

Michael Shilo DeLay

They make a little slug, basically.

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah. It's insane. You can actually see it on the plate. They come together, they move around, they find the place where they're going to grow their stock, and then only the cells that are at the very end of the stock are the ones that reproduce. And so all the rest sacrifice themselves for the production of this reproducing body.

Michael Shilo DeLay

It's not just like a mushroom either, it's like wiggling around and it's like a little organism. It's kind of wild.

Bernardo Kastrup

You know that marine animal called a Portuguese man of war? It's coherent, it moves coherently. There is division of labor. Some of the organisms in it are stingers, others are floaters, others are to digest prey. It's not one organism. It's a colony. So yes, there are colonies, there is commensal. Isn't the only instance where organisms seem to truly have merged is mitochondria. It's the only instance in natural history where there is good reason to think that mitochondria were once a separate organism. Why do we know that they even have their own DNA? That's different from. The DNA in the nucleus. So, look. Commensal isn't colonies. Things coming together, sharing goals and dividing work. Even specialization. Yes, that's common. But. No animal that is multicellular in one organism with one DNA has ever come to the earth. By cells piling together on top of one another. Multicellular organisms, they grow. They are not assembled. I am still the same zygote that I once was in the womb of my mother. That zygote was unicellular, right? There is no question of it being a compound entity at that point, it was one cell. I submit to you that I am still the same non compound unitary organism that when I was a zygote in my mother's womb, the only thing that happened is that zygote has created internal structure. It has created internal complex application, internal differentiation, internal specialization through growth. Now the template for that in their complex ification is cellular. Because something that is a cell, only knows how to be another cell. Being a cell is the original template. So internal structure is created by and iteratively and recursively reapplying that template to the organism itself. And we call it mitosis or cell division. I submit to you that there is no division. What's happening is an inner complex ification of what was and will always continue to be a unitary non compound organism. It's just that the template of that inner complex fixation is a fractal reflection of what the thing was in the beginning, because that's the only thing it knows how to be. So I am not a compound organism because we can identify cells in my body. Those cells did not pile together, crawled together and pile on top of one another to form me. No, it. Started as a unitary zygote, and it's still a unitary organism. When an organism that was unitary no longer is unitary. When that happens, we call it cancer.

Anastasia Bendebury

So I want to make a point about this is the egg without sperm is not an organism. It's just an egg. And so at the very.

Bernardo Kastrup

Least, we're talking about the zygote. So immediately after the condition.

Anastasia Bendebury

But I think that single cells coming together to form the structures that then differentiates. And so to make the to make the barrier at the zygote is to ignore that there is a coming together of single cells that then sets off the motion that produces you as the structure, the differentiation. And I say this not to just contradict, but because they spend a lot of time thinking about multicellularity in the context of bacterial biofilms. I studied them when I was doing my Ph.D. and it really got to me that it's very difficult to not treat the biofilm as an organism because it starts with a single cell that cell divides. It has the same genetic profile. It has structures, it has specialization. It has all of these things. And guess as it's not as complex as we are, perhaps in the sense that it's not writing operas and books and things like that, but it follows the exact same processes. But at the end of the day, it's this aggregation of individual cells that produces the body.

Michael Shilo DeLay

The same argument can be applied to the entire earth at some point. Like the entire biosphere could be traced back. I mean, at least that's what the textbooks try to do right now is trace the origins of life back to this one moment that occurred and everything else has come from it. Which, you know, I'm a little skeptical of. But the the point is that then in that sense, everything is just one organism still. And you're left with this guy in business. And now you have to start thinking about communities of planets interacting.

Bernardo Kastrup

Yeah. We have to be careful about how we sort of slide from one conceptual understanding to another without noticing that either we are conflating things or incurring in a logical fallacy, very subtle one. When we sort of move from one side to the other. Your slime film, if it began with the one cell that underwent mitosis to get you the film, I would say that's one organism and it's still the same unitary organism that it was. When it was just one cell before it started dividing, those cells in the film, they do not crawl towards one another and pile on top of one another to form the film. No, they grew out of the inner complex situation of the original cell. Now, when you talk about fair condition, the sperm and the egg. The analogy would hold. Some would hold some water in the context of what we are discussing. If the sperm SSL distinguishable from th egg SSL were still present. But that's not what happens. They are not distinguishable as different cells in the zygote. Zygote is unitary. So in the context of what we are discussing, that metaphor doesn't apply. It doesn't do what you seem to want it to do because there is no sperm. The sperm separate from the egg in the zygote. They are collapsed together.

Anastasia Bendebury

To some degree. But you can still identify the chromosome that comes from your father and the chromosome that comes from your mother.

Bernardo Kastrup

Of course. But the difference...

Anastasia Bendebury

I see where you're trying to say, which is that there is an integration of the substance inside of a single body that is then driving.

Bernardo Kastrup

Yet most of the sperm is gone, is left behind, but doesn't even get in and it becomes a husk and outside. So if we start counting from the zygote, which was a unitary non compound organism. One cell, not a piling up of a sperm and an egg, the zygote is one cell. It has unified metabolism. From that point on, what you get is not an aggregation of cells. What you get is growth? What you get is an inner complex situation? If you look at the three day old embryo, it will have the same size as this I got immediately after foundation. To have the exact same boundaries, same size, rooted in the same place. Oh, that you will see that is different. Is that in one case, the. Three day old case? There is more in their structure. That's all. And that infrastructure is not created by eight cells coming together. It was created by not in their complex ification of the original zygote. A living being is given its form the inside out raw materials come from the outside, but the plan comes from the inside out. A car is given its form from the outside in. Engineers defined the form of the car and then they assemble. Or weld the parts together. We are not assembled. Multicellular organisms are not assembled. They grow and this is it. This is a fantastic difference. And we lose sight of it in this course. When we start talking about our being multicellular organisms formed by several cells as if cells were parts like the cars parts. But it's not the history of the organism. That's not how the organism came to be. We are not made of parts because we were not assembled. We have in their structure the complexity fights through growth in a fractal way. Know the original form was a cell. We apply that same template cell like template recursively and inwards in the fractal way. And yes, there is these little things that we call other cells, but they are part of a unified whole when they are not. We speak of cancer. We were not assembled like a car was and we lose sight of it. Somehow, in our culture, we like to speak of ourselves as made of parts as a mechanism. And doctors as car mechanics. And why do we do that? Because it's obviously not appropriate if we just think for 30s or longer. It's obviously not appropriate. We are not made of parts, for God's sake.

Anastasia Bendebury

I mean, that much is obvious. And the the question remains in this source of the the growth, because there's something weird about multicellularity, which is that if you look at eukaryotes, eukaryotes are characterized by having mitochondria. So they've experienced this merging of organisms and the creation of a different grounds for evolution. You have, we've discovered only one organism that fills the gaps between a single celled eukaryote and, you know, are you carry out of maybe a couple of hundred cells. There's this weird evolutionary space that we haven't really quite figured out, which is how do you go from a single eukaryotic cell to something that can be a true multicellular body that grows out of fertilization and this inward differentiation and the only organism that fills that gap is this It's called vulva sin algae. And they make these really beautiful spherical colonies. But even with them. It seems more of a of a bacterial kind of body plan than it is a true multicellularity, where you have this progressive complexity of structure. And so that gap is really interesting to me because I think that if we could understand how it is that organisms crossed that in the first place, we would have a clearer sense of what it means for us to grow and differentiate from the zygote.

Bernardo Kastrup

But you're looking for that answer on the basis of individual cells piling up together.

Anastasia Bendebury

Well, it's not necessarily even individual cells piling up together, but it has even if you say that, okay, it's a mutagenic strategy where the individual cell in the next generation decides that it's going to make two of itself.

Bernardo Kastrup

Exactly.

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah. Where are those cells? Like that doesn't exist. There's not a continuum of organisms that we have discovered that appear to growth. And that's perplexing. And so to me, I'm like, okay, so is that a sign that there is some kind of coming together that we haven't found yet? Because prior to figuring out the end of symbiotic hypothesis, we didn't know that there was a point of coming together. And so is there something that's still missing from our understanding of biology, where there was a second coming together that allowed for true multicellularity to emerge? But it's probably not something that's happening in the moment.

Bernardo Kastrup

So the first coming together has left its footprint in a very obvious way. Mitochondria have their own DNA, and it's different from the nuclear DNA to look for the second coming together. You would expect to see something like that. But we don't. We don't see multicellular organisms that aren't just colonies that aren't engaging commands and isn't we don't see them having different DNA. Now, there are some peculiar exceptions to that. There are a chimera in which two eggs sort of merge together and make only one living beings cats have that, a cat that it's black to the left and ginger to the right. You can have that. But this is just a sort of. A coming together of what were originally. Very related, different organisms in the same womb.

Anastasia Bendebury

There's a lot of hybridization that happens in biology that we're just starting to figure out. Like we have this idea of species as being true, distinct separations between different beings and we draw this line in the sand that says that everybody to the left is one species, to the right is another, and they can't reproduce. And we're starting to discover that those delineations aren't really true or accurate or firm. And so there does seem to be some kind of coming together of two multicellular organisms that then produce a third that is unlike either one.

Bernardo Kastrup

Well, Chimera cat is still a cat. That can reproduce.

Anastasia Bendebury

Sure. But if you cross like this one guy I've been talking to a lot, he believes that it's possible to have, like, dog cow hybrids. And he has a lot of anecdotal evidence and he's still working out the genetic testing of this. But the idea that you could have diverse species coming together to produce something new is entirely possible. Does it true if, let's say for the sake of argument that it is possible, does it change how you would construct this, that you can have two totally different organisms come together?

Bernardo Kastrup

It's certainly possible. We have the ligers. We have mules.

Anastasia Bendebury

Characterized by infertility that the characterized by infertility. So in order for this to become something that actually propagates forward, you have to create a hybrid that's fertile.

Bernardo Kastrup

Yeah, but I think the point you are using is whether they can come together, whether they are fertile or not. And maybe it's not as applicable to the point we're trying to. The point in contention here. Do I  Acknowledge that two multicellular organisms? Can come together in a way that makes the boundaries between the two. Ambiguous? Of course I do. Siamese twins are examples of that. It's two distinct. Organisms, even distinct DNA, very related, but distinct to set partly separate mines, but not completely separate. There are instances of a Siamese twin feeling the taste that is in the mouth of the other. It depends on how tightly connected they are. But you can still. Discern the two. It's two. Unitary organisms. That got scrambled. But fundamentally they are to the chimera cat. You can even see which side is what because it looks different. So I do think that things that start. As fundamentally unitary and separate organisms at some point during growth can get scrambled together. Why do I think that? Well, because it's empirically a fact. I would be just an idiot to deny what is an empirical fact. But the question here is one of principles. That's why I kept on emphasizing. That they were fundamentally and in principle, two organisms that got scrambled together during growth. They are not a unitary organism, from a fundamental perspective. They were two and they got scrambled. The fundamental point that I'm trying to make at that fundamental level, what is one organism? Suppose it's not scrambling with anything else. That one organism is unitary and not compound. Now a unitary organism can get scrambled with one another. But each of the unitary organisms fundamentally is not compound. It's not fundamentally already a scrambling of multiple cells. It has not being assembled in an assembly line. It has created internal complex vacation and differentiation through applying practically the one template. It knows how to be, which is a cellular template. You see what I mean? I had the same discussion with Michael. I forgot his name. Biologist from Harvard. So we were having that same discussion the other day. And then and the point he made was similar to yours. He said, Well, I can start with two separate unitary organisms and I can scramble them. Yeah, sure. I'm sure that is possible. But that doesn't give us an answer to the question What is each of the unitary organisms you started with? What are they fundamentally? Are they fundamentally compound or are they fundamentally unitary? My claim is they are fundamentally unitary. And yes, you can scramble to fundamentally unitary things. That doesn't tell us that the things you scrambled to begin with were not unitary. You see what I mean?

Anastasia Bendebury

I see what you mean, but it becomes an evolutionary argument because then you start to have to introduce time because you have to ask, okay, well, so if this is a unitary organism, was it always a unitary organism or was there a point of scrambling that induced it to become something that was unitary stable for long enough for me to then pick up the experimental tools to be able to scramble them together?

Bernardo Kastrup

So let's say...

Anastasia Bendebury

Okay, go ahead.

Bernardo Kastrup

Let's take a sexual reproduction. What is the moment in time when that organism was already scrambled?

Anastasia Bendebury

Well. So let's say something like yeast budding reproduction. The moment of scrambling for the yeast probably has to go back pretty far in order to be able to actually start talking about what makes a cell. Look, I don't know enough about the deep evolution of yeast, so I have to spin it all the way back to the beginning and say there must be a scrambling in order to produce the cell to begin with, because you have to have all of these disparate parts that come together to produce a unit that acts as one. Otherwise, you just have nucleic acid over here, you have proteins over here, you have membranes over here. There has to be a process of these disparate parts to come together because we haven't figured out a way yet to within a single reaction vessel produce all of these things in one moment. That is just Genesis.

Bernardo Kastrup

Okay. You were trying to. When you say scramble at that level, you were alluding to abiogenesis the moment when non-life became life. That's the scramble. Because you're scrambling non-living things. But the point we were discussing is the scramble of already living things, which is the difference between unicellular organisms and multicellular organisms. What's the difference between the multicellular organisms and a unicellular one? Can we speak of the multicellular one as being a compound organism. As opposed to the unicellular one which is undeniably unitary? So the whole discussion is already after abiogenesis. I guess you extrapolated it to Before abiogenesis. Which is a very fun discussion to have, but it's not what we were talking about. That's the only point I'm trying to make.

Anastasia Bendebury

That's fair. Okay, so then let's say that you look at the genome of the yeast and you realize that the genome of the yeast is actually an assembled genome. Like, let's say, I don't know enough about the genome of the yeast. But if you look at it and you do a genetic analysis and you realize that, okay, so these parts appear to be related to these organisms and these parts appear related to these organisms. And so there's an evolutionary moment where you had two bacteria or funguses that came together to mix their genomes to produce something that behaves as the yeast. And it was such a powerful mixture that now you have an organism that emerges from that you can call yeast. But it seems entirely plausible that the evolutionary path, especially when you get down to bacteria, like there's not a clear evolutionary tree that we can retrace to say, okay, this is what the path from the last universal common ancestor was to even the most simple bacteria that we have today because they are so promiscuous in their trading of genes.

Bernardo Kastrup

Yeah.

Anastasia Bendebury

And everything.

Bernardo Kastrup

Look. I don't mean to patronize you at all. You know, what I am going to say?

Anastasia Bendebury

Do it.

Bernardo Kastrup  

Because I will look like one of those constipated, analytic philosophers that tries to be so precise in the way they apply concepts.

Anastasia Bendebury

I love it.

Bernardo Kastrup

But in this case, it's important that we have conceptual clarity. The scrambling of DNA. Yes, I understand how the word scrambling can be applied to different segments of the DNA having different evolutionary histories. You could have a virus carrier. That implants DNA from something else in a cell that becomes incorporated in the DNA of that cell and then starts its own evolutionary branch. So you can have scrambling of the DNA. But we are using now the word scrambling in a different sense than we were using before. The scrambling we were talking about is when different. Living cells come together to form a multicellular organisms. Like King and Chimera. Chimeric cats or Siamese twins. So the word applies colloquially to both, but. We mean entirely different things. In one case, it's how the DNA code got mixed up through whatever vector is happening during evolutionary history. But the point we were discussing is what is the nature of multicellular organisms? Are they formed when multiple cells come together and scramble to form a multicellular organisms or are they fundamentally unitary? And they simply grow through mitosis, through a recursive application of the same templates to internal differentiation. So this scrambling in one case is not this crumbling on the other. And if you know what I mean, even if the DNA of a cell has been evolutionarily scrambled. Because of the evolutionary history of that species, because of a virus, viral intervention or something akin to what happened with mitochondria, which I don't think is plausible, because otherwise we would see a different DNA there and we don't. The scrambling of that DNA is a different process then the discussion about the nature of multicellular organisms. You see what I mean?

Anastasia Bendebury

I mean, I guess what I would say to that is, that I would need to understand better the asexual reproduction of a multicellular organisms because that's a pretty rare case, I think I know of like nematodes that do that. But it's a very particular organisms.

Bernardo Kastrup

I think even snakes are capable of that. There are many high in sort of sexual reproduction. Yeah, It can happen. I think even some mammals. There are several cases. It's not the favorite strategy. But even in dramatic environmental circumstances where finding a mate is impossible. It can happen pretty involving animals. 

Michael Shilo DeLay

I think they just express both sexual organs, if I'm not mistaken.

Anastasia Bendebury

Which would be the same path towards multicellularity that it is in a fertilized zygote, which is that you have the two kinds within one organism and they come together and to produce the same sort of there's a moment of mixing to create the single entity that then grows and differentiates.

Bernardo Kastrup

So what I was referring to was not even an instance of hermaphrodites. It was just animals that in principle reproduce sexually that can express asexual cloning basically in difficult environmental conditions. So they don't need. To have both body parts.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Really? Might just like break breaking a half. And there's two snakes all of a sudden.

Bernardo Kastrup

I don't remember the exact instances, but it has been in the news several times in recent years that under severe environmental conditions, this can happen, I think, to some reptiles and amphibians. You can look it up. I'm sure you will find.

Anastasia Bendebury

I'll look into it. I think that it's a fascinating question. But so for me to be able to keep this as something that I read into it. Basically the question is this what is the difference between the coming together of individual cells to create an aggregate that behaves together where the cells remain distinct from one another versus the true multicellularity, which is that one cell differentiates into the panoply of structures that we see as multicellularity.

Bernardo Kastrup

In one case you have a colony. In the other case you have an organism. So it is a portuguese man of war, a multicellular organisms. Standard reply is it is not. It's a colony of different organisms. It's a coral. The multicellular organisms. The standard answer is that it's not. It's a colony of polyps. So somehow in biology we know how to make that distinction, otherwise we wouldn't be making that distinction. And the polyps in the coral. They start they are aggregates the same thing in that Portuguese menopause cells in those cases do come together and pile up on top of one another. But in the case of through multicellular organisms, everything starts with one cell. Which then divides creates internal complex fixation. So you see that in the history of the organism, How was it formed. By cells crawling towards one another and piling up together or by inner differentiation and growth and death, I think is what allows us to make the distinction. And in the case of the sperm and the egg or other examples, you may take even when two different organisms somehow interacted and scrambled their DNA. They didn't become an aggregator at that point. They became one. Cell. As I got. They didn't pile up together. They  literally merged into a unitary organism. So that coming together, it's not an instance of colony formation. Because the original organisms vanished for the sake of a new single celled unitary organism. And that's your starting point from that point on through multicellular organisms, they form through within their complex ification of the original zygote. And that's not what you see with Portuguese men of war or coral reefs. They are formed by different organisms literally coming together and piling up on top of one another.

Anastasia Bendebury

And what do you build on the back of this distinction?

Bernardo Kastrup

That we despite being multicellular organisms are unitary and not compound. While Portuguese Men of War is truly a compound because it was assembled, it didn't grow. The coral was assembled through polyps coming together. It didn't grow, but a polyp is unitary. A human is unitary. Multicellularity does not imply a fundamental compound being because cells in the multicellular organisms are not parts. They are internal structures that have grown through internal differentiation, a form of differentiation that is fractal. It's the recursive application of the same template. Just like fractals are. Why? Because the original unitary single cell only knew how to be a single cell, so it can only create structure. By practically, reproducing, reapplying that template that it knows. How to be to itself recursively. So the point I'm trying to make is there is a fundamental difference between a colony of Portuguese men of war and a human being? You can find many cells in both, but in one case, the cells are parts and in the other case, the cells are not parts. That's the point I'm trying to make.

Anastasia Bendebury

And what is the significance of them being pirates or not pirates?

Bernardo Kastrup

Through parts may have private conscious in their life of their own different coral polyps may have private consciousnesses of their stinger cells in the Portuguese men of war may have a private conscious in their life distinct from the floaters. But my liver cells do not have private conscious in their life distinct from my own. Because there are no liver cells there are. No neurons. These are all segments of a painting that we normally in other words, purely systemically trace and give a name to. So we can describe the thing. But then we forget that the names we apply to different segments of the one unitary painting. I just that there are just names that get two different words. Neurons, Liver cells, kidney cells. Then we forget that these are just names and we start thinking of them as two parts. And therefore raising the question is there anything it is like to be my liver cell? And my point is discretion is absurd. Because we're in language. Turning the liver cell into a proper part, which it is not. It's just a few brushstrokes of a painting. We carved them out from the whole. Nominally by convention. Because it facilitates communication and facilitates description facilitates modeling. But they didn't come from different parts of the world and piled up together. They are not parts. They are just recognizable fractal templates of a process of inner differentiation of what is fundamentally a unitary organism. So there is nothing it is like to be a neuron in Bernardo's head. Because there are no neurons stroke of a neuron is nominal. It's just for convenience. There is only Bernardo a unitary organism. Just as he was unitary when he was a single celled zygote without neurons, without liver cells. Nothing fundamentally changed from that point. To now, 50 years later. All that happened was internal differentiation through a recursive fractal application of a template. So my cells are not bands. They are not entities. They don't exist. There is only me, but I have a certain structure. That can be more conveniently described. If we carve out these. Nominal boundaries between different parts. Of the structure. Different segments of the structure and give them names. But don't forget that this is just a language game and we start thinking of those cells that form me. As two parts as if I had been born. I don't know how many trillion cells crawled towards one another and piled up on top of one another in an assembly line. That's not what happened. That's not the history of me. You see that?

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah, I totally get. I fully understand the distinction that you're making though, and I appreciate the importance of the distinction. And so then the question to put the bow on it is if looking at the individual parts as parts is useful for, say, what doctor to go to when something is broken, then what is the utility of treating it as not being differentiated and as being an entire whole? What does it allow you to do downstream of that unification?

Bernardo Kastrup

I'll mention just the most glaring examples, but there are many subtle examples. We routinely talk of the placebo effect. It's not in dispute. It's not polemical the effect exists. We know it happens. We also know it's getting stronger. And this is a big problem for pharmaceutical companies, because to approve a medicine, you have to prove. That you are X percent better than the sugar pill and the sugar pill is getting better. So it's getting more and more difficult to approve new medicines. Beyond the empirical recognition that the effect exists and is phenomenally strong, we do not have in mainstream biology an account for it. Why? Because we think in terms of proper parts, we forget that the parts are just nominal to language. And we start treating cells and tissues and organs. As actual proper parts on the basis of this pattern of thinking. Think in terms of part the placebo effect is confounding. Why would there be such an effect? I mean, we know that there is a placebo effect even associated with knee surgery. When your knee and you get old and your knee suffers and slate, I have a dirty word in my mind, but I'm failing to translate it now.

Anastasia Bendebury

Degradation!

Bernardo Kastrup

Degradation a very mechanical thing. You know, the lubrication in your knee joint. Gets damaged bone and tendons get damaged. The very mechanical thing you would expect that the placebo effect would have nothing to do with it. But it turns out research was done. People who had a debilitating knee pain and could no longer walk and they would get free knee surgery if they accepted. The conditions of participating in a study. No details given and the half those people received actual knee surgery to repair the joint. The other half, they only received the three little cuts for endoscopic surgery. But there was no intervention. So it was just three skin cuts and stitches. Nothing else. No intervention, no surgery. No cleaning, no correction. Nothing. No repair. Nothing. The people who received fake surgery showed significant clinical improvements to the point that two of them and this was talked about a few years ago two of them. Even after being told they didn't receive surgery. They did not believe because they said, well, before I couldn't even walk. Now I know I can go for a run. I can play sport. Of course, I received surgery. You mixed up your files. You don't know what you're talking about. So how can something that is in principle here believe affect very mechanically something all the way down there in your knees. If you think in terms of proper parts, this is very tricky. You start having to think in terms of signaling chemical signaling of some sort or some nerve effect and some feuds. It gets very complicated, if at all possible. But if you think of the human organism as a unitary entity that is not made of proper parts. Then of course, the placebo effect makes sense. You're dealing with a whole.

Anastasia Bendebury

We are delighted to announce that Mr. Con 2024 for our very first scientific conference is officially launched and you can buy tickets right now at the link in the description and also in the link that is up in either this corner or this corner. We are going to gather in Austin, Texas, on April 7th and eighth of 2024 for two days of talks on consciousness, mythology, archeology, solar physics, hypnosis, and much, much more. Buy tickets now up at this link.

Bernardo Kastrup

You are creating, you're applying an influence here. But because we are a whole an influence here can have an effect. Everywhere because there are no parts. We are not the car that was assembled. Another example of the placebo effect, even when the patient knows he's not getting medicine. It can still work. You can treat skin warts caused by viruses. Nothing psychosomatic at all. Viruses on the skin. On the surface, on the epidermis. You can treat skin warts effectively with hypnosis or talk therapy. It's in the annals of Annals of Medicine. It's right there. And so these are the examples of what could be done. If we would truly take to heart the empirical fact that human beings are wholes and not mechanisms made of proper parts. What we could accomplish if we were to buy into this reality and then act accordingly. In other words, develop therapies accordingly develop therapies without making the assumptions that we are kind of cars that were assembled somewhere made of proper parts. Because right now nobody is using the placebo effect. Nobody's leveraging it. It's not even. Ethical to leverage it. Because it would imply staging something to the patient. Why? Which is what Shamans have done throughout history to great effect at this stage something? It's all bullshit, but it doesn't matter. It has an effect, a psychological effect. But the psychological effect is a physical effect because we are not made of part. This is not a part. Separate from my knees or my liver or my kidneys. It's one integrated whole. So if you fly, in effect anywhere in that whole, if you apply an influence anywhere in that whole, you can have an effect anyway in it. Because because it is a whole. It's not made of fact. What new avenues of treatment would we open up. If we would just acknowledge this very simple empirically undeniable. Understanding that we are not an assemblage of parts, we are holes. Then all kinds of new degrees of freedom would open for the very pragmatic empirical development of therapies that would use all those degrees of freedom instead of constraining itself artificially because of the way you use language. It's absurd. But anyway, just one example.

Anastasia Bendebury

I mean, I think that the really powerful examples I hold up, I mean, one of many placebo studies on knee surgeries. And so they tested in this one 180 patients and there were no differences between the placebo group where they got the fake surgery and the group that got the real surgery. Which is...

Bernardo Kastrup

Medicine. Medicine has been the application of placebo until the middle of the 19th century. That was all there was to medicine and somehow we abandoned that. Because of our silly reductionist thinking. I mean, I am a reductionist as well, but there is reasonable reductionism and silly reductionism to think of us as an assemblage of parts is just silly reductionist. It flies in the face of empirical evidence.

Anastasia Bendebury

I mean, it's fascinating because I'm looking at and there's a New England Journal of Medicine study about this. And so they're looking at the relative pain scale that changes. And what I see in the chart is not the placebo is better than that, the surgery. It's just that neither the surgery. No, the placebo really work. Like there's a small, there's a decrease of, you know, on a scale of 0 to 100 in terms of pain, self-reported pain goes from 65 to 55. So there's a dip look for both knee surgery.

Bernardo Kastrup

There is a reason why people are receiving knee surgery every day, and that has been so for years. I don't know which specific study you're looking at, but if the point you're making is that knee surgery doesn't work, now you're talking about something entirely else. Which is why we do then knee surgery at all. Why? Why does my insurance company pay for it if I want to have it tomorrow?

Anastasia Bendebury

That's an entirely different conversation.

Bernardo Kastrup

Yeah. Even if you don't like this particular example, look at placebo effect. In general and there are myriad examples. One would think that placebo effect should apply only from mind related things common psychosomatic illnesses or mental illnesses because not to mind effect on the mind that sounds very reasonable and indeed. That's very strong. We know that our eyes are about only 2% better than a sugar pill when it comes to alleviating depression and anxiety. But the thing about placebo studies is that it's not only about mind related. Stuff, it's about the very physical stuff skin, warts. It's about that. And many other things that you would say have nothing to do with mind. So yeah, have a broader look at it. Don't look at only one specific study and you always find studies that will say, No, this placebo doesn't work. Of course you can find studies that will refute anything in any science. The question is what does the aggregate of these studies, what consensus does the aggregate lead one to? And the aggregate consensus today. Is that placebo is pretty strong. It's real. It's not it's not polemical anymore. It's not in dispute.

Anastasia Bendebury

I mean, I think that there is something that runs beyond mechanism. And in order for it to run beyond mechanism, we have to explore the other parts of life and existence and medicine is one of those places where we can do that because we create tests where we say, okay, intervention versus fake intervention, what happens? And we can point to it and we can.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Why do you suspect that there's no mechanism underpinning that?

Anastasia Bendebury

It's not a physical mechanism in the pure sense of the bullet target strategy of medicine, which is that we take this pill or we give you this physical intervention where, you know, like in the case of the knee surgery, like the words is trickier.

Michael Shilo DeLay  

I mean, still must be some sort of chemical communication going on at the end of the day. I mean, it just seems like there's even though we don't understand the mechanism, there must be mechanisms to.

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah. Like do you do buy that? There is...

Michael Shilo DeLay

I mean, this gets into the interesting border between substrate and form and this idea that you have with the analytic idealism that the form is somehow precedes the substance or the substrate. Like aren't these fields, these conscious fields are somehow fundamental in your conception of nature.

Bernardo Kastrup

And their analytic ideal is all there is a field of subjectivity. The consciousness is not created. It's that within which everything happens transpires. Your question depends on how we define mechanism. Broadly defined if I use the word mechanism in the sense of dynamics and regularities in nature's behavior. The dynamics of nature's behavior, the dynamics of nature's expression. Then, of course, everything flows according to some kind of mechanism, some identifiable dynamics that can be described. So I would be not surprised at all if you would find these dynamism correlated with the placebo effect, because the placebo effect as an effect is something that happens and anything that happens is a dynamism. So there will be an identifiable dynamics, describable dynamics underlying the effect. Because that's what the effect is. It's the result of that dynamism. And that's a fundamentally material dynamism. It's, you know, fundamentally a cause and effect chain of some material actors acting upon one another. Yeah, that's where I would differ from the mainstream. The mainstream sees the physical dynamics as causal. And the mental dynamics as an epic phenomenon. I don't see things that way. I think only mental dynamics are positive. And physical dynamics are what those mental processes look like. When observed from across a dissociative boundary. In other words, brain activity is not what causes experience. Brain activity is what the associated private. Inner experience looks like. When observed from the outside. Physical stuff is the representation, the appearance of processes that are fundamentally mental. And of course, this reinterpretation of the relationship between physicality and mentation in which physicality. Now becomes appearance and mentation becomes causally effective that reinterpretation suddenly makes the placebo effect entirely reasonable consistent.

Michael Shilo DeLay

But just seem inseparable to me. Like there's a feedback loop there. You know, you can't exist outside of your body, like you're married to the physical processes. If I want to effect something in the room, I have to use my arm to push the desk or whatever I want to manipulate. So I do have to work within the physical confines like the substrate matters at the end of the day very much. And it's what I my mental activity is using in that sense to affect the physical world or to affect any real world.

Bernardo Kastrup

That's a dualist too. It's a dualist intuition. And I sympathize with you because that's what we inherent and that's what is bashed into our heads throughout our lives in the Western world. I will offer you a different perspective. And instead of thinking of two different things, physical stuff and mental stuff and the mental stuff needs the physical stuff. In order to have a causal influence into the world instead of thinking these dualistic terms, think of physicality as appearance and meditation. This thing in itself. We are obviously separate from the rest of the world. The rest of the world is not constituted by my thoughts. My wish is my fantasies. I cannot change the world merely by wishing it to be different. I cannot change the outcome of the war in Ukraine by making morning affirmations. And the world will still be going on after I am no longer here. The existence of the world outside my individual mind does not require the presence of my individual mind to be the case to exist. So there is an external world. My point is the external world. Is also mental. Just like my thoughts are outside your individual mind and my thoughts are still mental. My thoughts would still be here even if you were not there. And my thoughts will not change purely because of your morning operations from your perspective. My thoughts are objective, but inherently my thoughts are subjective. That's their essence, even though they appear to be objective from your perspective. Now, this separation between us and the world under an analytic ideal is the result of a dissociation. In this one, subjective field that nature is. That's what accounts for the difference between my in their mental processes and the mental processes of nature out there. And that's why I cannot change the mental processes that constitute nature at large just by changing my in their mental processes. The latter are dissociated from the former and therefore cannot directly causally influence the former. They are separated by a dissociative boundary. Now your physical body is what this dissociative process looks like. So think of physicality as appearance as what? A dissociated mental complex in nature it looks like your body. Now, to influence the outside world beyond the boundaries of the dissociation, you have to apply an influence to the dissociative boundary. Right, because he cannot get across the boundary. So if he wants to influence the world outside, it has to be through the boundary or through the states of a mark of blanket. There is a way to mathematically formalize all this. Now, what does the boundary look like? Well, it looks like your skin. So you have an effect in the world. You have to move your skin. That doesn't mean that you're using physical means to have an effect. It only means that the mental dynamics. That you will be engaging in look like a body moving in the physical world. The physical world and the body are appearances of mental processes, one of them dissociated from the other. The one that is dissociated from the rest of the world appears to your observation as your body. That's what it looks like.

Michael Shilo DeLay

I think draw the lines a little bit differently though it's not like a mind body duality. It's more just like body and motion of bodies, right? But everything can be traced. Like you either have a static body like a rock. It's not, you know, in some context or the table or even a protein. And then it goes into motion, which is then used to effect change of the location of that body, essentially. And so all that I mean, I'm not trying to demean mental activity at all, but it is in some sense can be boiled down to the motion of bodies as well, because obviously, if you explode the brain, you don't have any more mental activity anymore because you no longer have the ability for those physical interactions to proceed. You can't drive the motion of the atoms, you know, to produce the electric currents necessary or whatever it is.

Bernardo Kastrup

You're thinking dualist terms.

Michael Shilo DeLay

I mean, it's just motion. It's just actors and actions.

Bernardo Kastrup

That's now what you're thinking in the following terms. I will my arm to move and that mental will somehow has an effect on my physical arm and my arm moves. So the movement of my arm is a cause of my intention to move. So it is an effect of my intention to move. And my intention to move is the cause of the physical movement of my arm.

Michael Shilo DeLay

So I think it's even deeper, though. I think that the arm is moving because of literally atoms moving around inside of your brain.

Bernardo Kastrup

That's how we describe the appearances. We describe the appearances in terms of atoms. Look, one way to think of it is cause effect. A mental cause has a physical effect. My arm has moved. There are lots of problems with this because. One, we are separating meditation from physicality. And if we separate them, how can one have a causal influence on the other? That's the direction problem of dualism. Another way to think about it that doesn't run into this problem at all is the following. My arm movement is what's the mental process? The intention of moving me. Like the intention of moving my arm. That intention looks like an arm moving. It's not an effect. It's how the thing looks like.

Anastasia Bendebury

Hmm.

Bernardo Kastrup

The only thing going on is the intention that I describe as moving my arm. The movement of the arm is what that intention looks like. It's the appearance of the mental process.

Michael Shilo DeLay

But the mental process fundamentally has the mechanistic aspect to it, right? I feel like neuropsychologists and so forth, I've done ample work to let's say, destroy little pieces of brain so that they aren't capable of moving the arm, let's say. Okay. And so fundamentally, the action and the ability to even plan that action or exercise it still have this machinery below them, for lack of a better word.

Bernardo Kastrup

Mechanism is how we describe and make sense of the appearances. When things appear to you and all you have is the appearance of the thing, then you think in terms of the language of the appearances. And when you describe the appearances, you think you would be describing the thing in itself because all you have access to is how the thing appears to you. Now, where does dualism try to come back in? It tries to come back in, just like you said, if a neurosurgeon goes into my brain and pokes around with an electrode. I experience different things. If God forbid his life is something wrong in my brain, I will be unable to experience certain things like smell would be gone or we don't need to go through to a surgery scenario. If you prick my arm with a needle, I feel pain. If I drink a glass of alcohol, my experience changes. So in the traditional way of thinking, you would say, well, obviously there is a physical cause. And a mental effect. Therefore, physicality precedes mentality. Mentalities appear phenomenal because the arrow of causation goes from the physical cause to the mental effect. It's again dualist thinking. Let me describe the same thing to you again from a different perspective. When I drink a glass of wine that physical glass of wine. Is what a mental process beyond my dissociative boundaries look like. All physical stuff is the appearance of mental stuff when these mental stuff is observed across a dissociative boundary. So not only the atms that constitute my body, my brain are the appearance of my mental processes. The atoms and fields that constitute the. World at large too, are the appearance of mental processes in the world at large. So there is no physical glass of wine. There is no physical needle that pricks my arm. The needle in the glass of wine are the appearances of mental processes that I bring into my dissociative boundary. By drinking the glass of wine or pricking my skin with the needle. Those external mental processes are now brought inside my dissociative conscious in their life and they have a mental to mental effect. And therefore I feel the pain when I get drunk. When the surgeon takes a scalpel to my brain, what's happening is that the mental process that looks like a scalpel, is aggressively interfering with with another mental process that looks like my brain? So the causation is mental to mental. But we can only access it through appearances. So we describe it as a scalpel slicing into a brain or a needle, a piercing a skin or a glass of wine being drunk. But what is actually happening is that processes beyond the dissociative boundaries that constitute me as an individual separate from the world. Those mental processes are now being brought into my private conscious in their life. They are piercing through my dissociative boundary. In the form that appears as a needle piercing through my skin where a scalpel is listening to my brain. Or alcohol being ingested. I'm bringing in mental effects, mental causes that were out there to me. And that, of. Course, has a menthol effect. Because I brought them in and there is a mental to mental causation process. Mental to mental conversation is trivial. We experience it every day. Just think about thought. And pay attention to how you feel mean thoughts can cause emotions. Emotions can cause thoughts mental to mental causation. Physical to mental causation is just mental to mental causation, which appears to observation in the form of needles scalpels and glasses of wine. And then you don't have any more interaction problem. Of course, what we call physical causes have mental effects. Why? Because of their mental. Is it currently just the appearance. Of mental things in themselves?

Anastasia Bendebury

And how does the needle get defined as a mental process or the scalpel? Like I understand the mental process of the human and I can sort of see this, you know, I imagine as this kind of bubble of mental processes that are encased in this dissociative barrier and it's like a skin upon a deeper substance. Okay. I get that, but I don't. But that's because I can imagine the human or any other living being as having an internal state of mind. But the needle. How does the needle have, how is that represented by the same mental state?

Bernardo Kastrup

Then the needle is the representation of a mental state. Not the same mental states that constitute you.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Who's mentally?

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah, that's what I want to know. Like whose mental state creates the needle?

Bernardo Kastrup

Mental states at large.The mental states that constitute nature at large. In other words, the states of the world out there. As it is in itself, the world out there beyond our individual minds. As it is in itself, is constituted of mental states. That's the hypothesis.

Michael Shilo DeLay

So do you believe that actions require actors, I mean, it just seems like you're taking an action and treating it as an actor to me. Like a process is an action.

Bernardo Kastrup

Any action requires some form of actor. But we should not anthropomorphize that any behavior is the behavior of something. Any action is the action of something.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Right. But aren't you starting with the action? Huh? Aren't you building this world view off of action? Isn't a process an action?

Bernardo Kastrup

No, no.

Michael Shilo DeLay

It's dynamic.

Bernardo Kastrup

Of course it is.

Michael Shilo DeLay

But all dynamics are actions.

Bernardo Kastrup

Where are you going with this?

Michael Shilo DeLay

I'm just trying to understand where the mind is emerging from, because the mind seems like an activity to me, like an action. It requires more than one actor. Like a physical actor.

Anastasia Bendebury

What seems like the mind is primary. The mind is the substance.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Right? I mean, it's not a body.

Anastasia Bendebury

So I think that, like, look it's not physical.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Right, Exactly.

Anastasia Bendebury

And so Shilo has a very, very strict physical ontology. Right?

Michael Shilo DeLay

I wouldn't say that. I'm just trying to understand, that's all, you know.

Bernardo Kastrup

So I'll try to describe it to you. I sympathize with you because. Being born in a world that speaks physicalism and trying to discern another point of view is very difficult. Because you always make unexamined physical assumptions. You think in physical terms, which is precisely. What will prevent you from seeing the other perspective.

Michael Shilo DeLay

It's even worse than that because like I did a Ph.D. and in like hard elastic physics, you know, I mean, I've just learned to see the world in terms of material processes. And that doesn't make it impossible for me to see mental processes, but I have a hard time imagining them outside of the chain of physical causality.

Bernardo Kastrup

Can we think or can we think in terms of states? And try to generalize it from physical states alone, just states.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Like states of activity.

Bernardo Kastrup

No. Can you conceive of static states?

Michael Shilo DeLay

Shape I guess an architecture. Would be a start.

Bernardo Kastrup

A building. And you think or not?

Anastasia Bendebury

So I think we've been having a lot of conversations about non dualism. And it is something that we're very much trying to understand because much of our audience really enjoys non dualism. And it is something that is so orthogonal to the way that we see the world. And this is genuinely an attempt to be able to visualize what the train of logic is like. I know it if you like, it can feel like trolling. Sometimes I feel like.

Bernardo Kastrup

But yet people like you are my daily fare. That's the people I meet. Okay. You did physics, so the concept of fuzing physics is very hand, has been handy since the early 19th. Century, right?

Michael Shilo DeLay

Yeah. I mean, I believe it's deeply flawed, though, as a fundamental actor as well at the same time. Well, I mean, they're dynamic entities, you know. I just I don't think they could be fundamental in that sense because they're dynamic.

Bernardo Kastrup

I'm not. Okay. Then you just threw away the whole of quantum field theory.

Michael Shilo DeLay

No, it's very practical.

Bernardo Kastrup

Entire foundation of Western science. I don't know.

Michael Shilo DeLay  

It's very practical, right? It's very practical. But in terms of natural philosophy, I think that it's you can, of course, create all sorts of equations to manipulate reality. This is very useful in parameter systems. You can make airplanes, rockets, transistors, all of these things, but you don't have to actually have this natural understanding of what the actual atoms are necessarily doing to inflict electricity upon another.

Bernardo Kastrup

Look, I'm trying to expose you to a different perspective. But you have to meet me in the middle. Because if you stick to your guns, it will be impossible for you to shift your head. It slant your head to the side to see the perspective. I'm trying to expose you to. So I'm trying to create some form of abstraction. That will allow you to let go of your commitment to physicality is fundamental, at least for the sake of argument. You don't need to believe what I'm trying to show you. I just want you to understand what is it that I am seeing? So you can judge it in its own terms? So the abstraction would be think in terms of state. What is a state? A state is something that is the case in nature, which could be something else. A state is what nature. Is at this point at this location right now. But it could be something else. It's not that something else. It is what it is now. And that what it is now is a state. States can change, and that's where dynamism comes. Now, let's forget the need to reduce states to a substrate. For now, we can come back to that later. But for now, let's just think in terms of state. Nature is made of states. Whether they're physical or mental or information informational. There are states, things that are where they are instead of something else. That they conceivably could be or could still be or could have been and snapshots. Yeah, I am also made of state. The reality of me now is a snapshot of the states of nature that constitute me. Both physicalism and analytic idealism fit with what I just said. Both acknowledge that there are external states and there are internal states and there's a boundary between the two. Right. The difference is that on their physical isn't these states are fundamentally quantitative. They have no inherent qualities. In other words, you can't. Exhaustively described a fundamentally physical state through a long enough list of the correct numbers. Mast charge momentum and speed, amplitude, frequency whatever on the physical exam. If you provide the correct set of numbers, you will have said everything there is to say about the fundamental physical state. Nothing will be missing on their analytic idealism. These numbers are merely descriptions of qualities. And it is the qualities that are the states.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Yeah, I'll buy that. That makes sense to me.

Bernardo Kastrup

So under analytic ideal is mass charge, momentum, amplitude frequency. Our descriptions of qualities. They are not the state. They are descriptions of the state.

Michael Shilo DeLay

But I think what they're describing is fundamentally some actor doing something, some action, some actor.

Bernardo Kastrup

I'll get there bear with me. Now, under analytic idealism, the states that constitute the world are qualitative and therefore mental. The states that constitute me are qualitative and therefore mental. And that's how we experience ourselves. If we cannot perceive our bodies, we still experience ourselves as a set of thoughts, emotions, desires, fantasies. Feelings of different thoughts. No. We are not the world. We are separated from the world. Mathematically, we can model this through a Markov blanket. In other words, there is a set of inner state. A set of external states. And then there are the states of the blanket. The states of the world can impinge on the states of the blanket. The states of the blanket can impinge on those internal states and the other way around. Our internal states can impinge on the states of the blanket, which in turn can impinge on the states of the world. When the impingement goes from the inside out, we call them the active states of the mark of blanket. When the impeachment comes from the outside in, we call them the sensory states of the mark of blanket under analytic idealism. The physical world is this sensory states of the mark of blanket, not the states of the world under analytic idealism. The physical world are the sensory states of the mark of blanket, not the states of the outside world. But it looks like the sensory states of the market, mark of blanket. Are the world for two reasons. One, their dynamics are modulated by the state of the external world. So the sensory states work as proxies for what's really happening out there. That's the first reason. The second reason is, we only have the sensory states of the markoff blankets to provide us information about the world. We have no way to directly access the world because we. Are surrounded by the mark of blanket. That's the definition of the dissociation. Yeah. Everything looks as though sensory states, physical states were what's really happening out there. But no. They are encoded inferential representations of the dynamics of the external world. We can prove this mathematically if our perceptual state mirrored the states of the external world. There would be no upper bound to our internal entropy because there is no apriori upper bound to the entropy of the world. Therefore, if we saw the world exactly as it is. By mirroring the states of the world directly into our cognitive states, seeing the world could be deadly. We could melt into hot goulash soup. That has never happened. Therefore, sensory states are encoded inferential representations of the real states of the world. What we call the numbers of physics? The quantities of physics amplitudes charge momentum, mass frequency, our descriptions of the sensory states. We describe the sensory states of the mark of blanket, which come together with our in their cognitive states and their information integration theory. You can't separate the two, but let's forget this detail for now. Under analytic idealism, we describe the sensory states of physics. In the sensory states are modulated by the real external states, so they work as proxies. Therefore, through that proxy, our physical descriptions actually directly describe the world as it is in itself. But we are not doing this description directly. Let me try another metaphor to make it clear. An airplane has sensors that measure the states of the sky outside. Right. The results of these measurements are represented to the pilot in the form of daily indications on the dashboard. The states of the dashboard represent the states of this sky outside. So much so that the pilot cannot ignore the dashboard. He will crash and burn. So there is a correlation between the state of the dashboard and the state of the sky outside. That the dashboard represents the state of the sky in an encoded form. But we are pilots that were born inside the cockpit of the airplane, and that cockpit has no transparent windows. All we have is the dashboard. We never get to see the world as it actually is. All we have is the dashboard. The mistake we make, is we take the dashboard for this discount site. The physical world is our dashboard. We also have sensors. Right. If you restrict.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Empiricist, like from a strictly empirical scientific ontology, I think we live in a deeply empirical times as far as science is concerned. And I think that, that's absolutely true, that at some point you have to surrender to the idea that everything is sort of happening inside of you at the end of the day or at the beginning of the day or however you look at it. But from as you know, there's been this war between empiricism and rationalism. And the rationalists would probably argue that you don't really need to observe to actually depend on your senses so much as imagine based on inductively observing everything else, you know, rocks crashing into each other and displace one another. Well, that same sort of thing must be going on over here as well. And so the ability of imagining just the imagination of the mechanism is sufficient as a hypothesis for what could be happening and in fact, should in some sense override this, you know, squishy dashboard business that can kind of muck things up and confuse.

Bernardo Kastrup

And if I were not a rationalist, I would be a solipsistic. Because in the absence of some line of reasoning, all they have is my own experience and therefore all thereis my own experience. I would be a solipsism. I would deny that there is something it is like to be you. I would think that you exist only in so far as what I perceive of you. But I am not that. I am not a solipsism. I am an idealist. So it is through a line of reasoning that they grant the existence of a world beyond my perception of it. A world that you and I share. And how do I do that? By saying that although the physical world is our internal dashboard and. Therefore the physical world is private. And personal and is in us and not outside. The sky outside, which modulates the dashboard. The real states of the world today are really out there. And they do not depend on my present. Depend on my presence. Here to exist. Look, if there are no airplanes flying in the sky and making measurements of the states of the sky, this guy doesn't disappear. And even though we are locked into our own. Airplane cockpit without windows and all we have is our dashboards. We can communicate enough with the other airplanes to know that our dashboards are mutually consistent. Therefore, all of our dashboards must be modulated by real external states. We must all be measuring real external states out there, and the results of those measurements is the physical world. So the physical world is private. And it's our own. But it's not the real world, the real world, the thing that we measure. In order to result in the representation we call the real world. That's real world is really. There in doesn't care whether we are measuring it or not, and we are all immersed in it and we cannot change it states through morning affirmations. So under analytic idealism, the real world is not physical. What does it mean for something to be not physical? Well, it means that these are states that cannot be exhaustively describable through physical quantities. Now, do these states, these states exist? Do we have examples of states that cannot be described through physical quantities? Of course we have. What is the lengthy centimeters of your thought? What is the mass in kilograms of your emotion? We can't describe endogenous experiential states through physical quantities. Why? Because we created physical quantities to describe perceptual states, to describe. The dynamics of the dials on the dashboard. But we also have our indigenous states, just like the world out there, has its indigenous states as well. Dashboard states are representations and coded representations of the real indigenous states of nature out there and just like ours. They are nonphysical in the sense of not being describable through physical quantities because we invented the quantities to describe the dashboard. Not the thing that is measured in order for the result of measurement to be displayed on the dashboard.

Anastasia Bendebury

And so the thing that comes downstream of that is whether or not we have the ability, capacity or whatever you want to call it, to imagine what is real. Or do you think that it stops at what can be physically described and real is something that is just beyond. It's like the spaghetti monster. Like, is it worth being like the spaghetti monster is moving the planets? Or do we just say, you know what, it's gravity? And that's the limitation.

Michael Shilo DeLay

It seems less supernatural than forces.

Bernardo Kastrup

I think through reasoning, we can be fairly sure and there are physicists who I respect. Who will disagree with what I am about to say, and I ask for their forgiveness. Maybe I'm not far enough yet in my understanding of these things that I'm still stuck where I am now. But here's where I am now through reasoning. I think it's inevitable for us to have to infer the existence of real states beyond ourselves. I don't think solipsism stands the test of reason because it is an incredibly implausible account of the consistency of descriptions interpersonal consistency of descriptions that we experience. It requires a very fine tuned level of inaccessible self-deception. That is less parsimonious than to just say, Well, other people who look like me are also conscious like I am, and they are describing the same world that I seem to perceive. So I think some form of realism is a necessary outcome of reasoning correctly applied. Now, there is a strong mathematical argument that what I just said is not necessarily true. And I apologize to my friend Marcus Miller for this. Because he has proven mathematically. But I can't help but grant realism. There are real states of the world. The step that I make that is not mainstream is to say those real states of the world are not the physical state. Even physics as he has been telling us for 40 years, culminating with the Nobel Prize last year. The physical properties are the results of measurements. We cannot say that, the thing that is measured is physical. But of course, there is something we didn't measure. So it must be real. It's just not physical. Is it coherent to say that there are things that are really not physical? Of course it is. My thoughts are not physical in the sense that they are not describable through physical quantities. And I'm not talking about other worlds and spiritual stuff. Maybe that stuff is real. But that's not what I'm talking about. It's not where I'm going with this. Where I'm going with this. Is that the screen of my perception, which is physical describable through physical quantities? That's just a dashboard. It's not the real world that we share. The real world that we share is nonphysical just like my endogenous inner states are nonphysical. My thoughts and emotions are nonphysical in the sense of not being describable through physical quantities. So it's very easy for me to imagine to use reasoning and not empiricism, but reasoning to extrapolate my own endogenous nonphysical state and say that nature at large. May be constituted of states that are akin to my endogenous states. I'm not saying that nature is made of human thoughts and human emotions. There is very strong reason to say that that cannot be the case because human thoughts and emotions evolved. Over 4 billion years on this rock. Why would nature have the same kinds of thoughts and emotions that we have? No. But at the more abstract level, my thoughts and emotions are instances of states. That are not physically describable. So I can infer through reasoning that the nature is also constituted of states that are not physically describable. And that when I interact with those states or to speak technical language, when I perform a measurement or an observation. Then the result of that measurement and observation will be conveyed to me in the form that we call colloquially the physical world of stuff and colors around us. And I then created numbers to describe what appears on the dashboard. Those are the equations of physics, and they do what they cling to do. They do describe reality, but indirectly through the representation of the dashboard. But again, the dashboard is modulated by the dynamics of the real states out there. So you can... In the sense, take the dashboard for the world in practice, it works in practice. A pilot that was born in an airplane cockpit without windows and learned to fly by instrument could very easily. It's very conceivable that that pilot would think that the dashboard is the world. Because everything happens as though. It were the world. And he does not experience anything other than that. We are pilots born in that airplane cockpit without windows. We take the dashboard for the world. And it works in practice for the development of technology. Where it doesn't work is in philosophy. When you start thinking more deeply about these things. And you realize that physics is showing us what the dashboard metaphor makes obvious, which is if you don't measure, there's nothing on the dashboard. If you don't perform a measurement in physics, there are no physical properties for 40 years. Almost 50 now. We have repeated an experiment in more and more nuanced forms that shows that and got a Nobel Prize last year. Until you measure there are no physical properties. Is that difficult to understand on the airplane dashboard metaphor? Of course not. The dashboard shows the results of measurements. If you don't measure, the dashboard shows nothing. There is no physical world if you don't measure. Because the physical world, this is the dashboard. But the thing measured is real. It's really out. There does not depend on measurement. It's just not physical because it's not the dashboards. It's the sky outside. We think the dashboard for this kind of site. And then in philosophy. And even in foundations of physics and even in the neuroscience of consciousness, it goes all wrong because now we have to explain ourselves in terms of the dashboard. It's like a painter who paints a self-portrait and then declares him to be this self-portrait. And now he has to account for his own consciousness in terms of the patterns of pigment distribution on canvas. That's the hard problem, of course, isn't. We think that we are made of dashboard stuff. That's the problem.

Anastasia Bendebury

I like this.  Yeah, We we do run into all kinds of problems, and I think that this is an accurate description of the source of those problems. I still struggle with the idea of the symmetric equivalence between the internal sort and the mental state of nature that is then measured to give something physical. And so I think that I would have to go and think about where that state of nature could emerge from. Because I think that it is possible to reason your way into what the underlying state is caused by or looks like before you measure it.

Bernardo Kastrup

Oh, yeah, it is.

Anastasia Bendebury

And I think that kind of what Shilo's after.

Michael Shilo DeLay

I think it all makes sense the way that you, especially because of the way that you've defined physics, which is has to do with assigned quantities and so forth. That makes sense to me because that's absolutely a mental process. I think that if you define physics a little differently than you probably have a different job to accomplish.

Bernardo KastrupAnd to define physics differently is to have a metaphysical commitment. Yes. And if you want to remain purely operational and not have a metaphysical commitment, then you are bound to the definition I shared with you. If you want to define physics as the science of the world as it is in itself. Right there, you are really making a metaphysical commitment that is arbitrary from a scientific perspective. And then that's what most people actually do. And I look to go back to that to the hypotheses you raised. Can we infer what the world is in and of itself? Aside from representation, aside from description. This year, I became more hopeful that, this can be the case. Let's just frame the question first. Remember can’t nomina and phenomena. Nomina is things as they are in themselves and phenomena is how things appear to us. Under analytic idealism and the metaphors that they describe to you. Phenomena is the physical world. The physical world is phenomena, not numinous. The dashboard is phenomenon, not numinous. The numinous is that which modulates the states of the dashboard through measurement. Physics is the science of phenomena because it's the science of perception. Even if we use instrumentation like telescopes and oscilloscope and microscopes, we still need to perceive the output of instrumentation so everything gets filtered out through perception. That's what physics is. It's a science of phenomena as opposed to a science of introspection like spirituality. Physics is a science of phenomena. Can we have a science of the minute? Can we have a description of things as they are in themselves? Well, that requires rationalism. Because empiricism fails you because you're locked up in that airplane cockpit without windows. All you have is the dashboard. That's the limit of empiricism. But rationalism can bring us further. And I think the map has been given to us by showing our ship how our reason in the following way. When it comes to me, I know the world as it is in itself. In other words, I know my mental states. I know the nomina. I can also perceive the representation of my mental states in the form of my body. So my body is the phenomena corresponding to the numinous that I experience directly my in inner mental state. Yeah. And then he he reason and I will give more than language to it. He was talking about he was talking terms of mass and substance. I would give more than language to it to be more rigorous, he reasoned the following way. My body is made of the same atoms and fields that constitute the rest of nature. So if in my case, my body is the phenomena of my pneumonia and my pneumonia are my mental states or they will. And again, the phenomenon that my body is made of the same atoms and force fields as the rest of nature, then the rest of nature to. These phenomena corresponding to Lumina. The rest of nature too, is a representation as opposed. To the way you show up in harsh terminology, representations, phenomena. Will is no minute. So let me repeat this. So you really grasp how simple it is. I have access to my own room in my own mental state. And I know that my new appear to observation in the form of atoms and force feuds that constitute my body. The same items enforced few to constitute the rest of nature. So the rest of nature too. Is a phenomenal representation of a mental numenor. That is the key because it gives us one part of nature in which we have access to both sides, the numinous and the phenomena. And we can establish a map between the two. We can try to create that by injective function that leads you from. A nominal state to the corresponding phenomenon state and back. I'm hoping to bisected function. It may not be, but some kind of coherent mapping between the two states. We can do it because when it comes to our own phenomena states, in other words, are a body in our own nominal state. In other words, our experiences, we have both sides of the equation. So we can create the map and then we can extrapolate that map to segments of nature. For which we only have access to the phenomena and not then we can. Extrapolated how they create this map. I think the most promising way to create this map in the world today is integrated information theory. It was created originally in the late 90s by Julia Timony. Chris, of course, has joined that effort. It's certainly the most theoretically advanced theory of experience of mapping between experiential states and bring states that we have today. It's the only one that honors experience for what it is. As opposed to trying to reduce it to something because of some metaphysical prejudice that mapping is still being created. You can imagine how tremendously difficult it is because we have to have very fine resolution access to all of our brain states in order to create the correct mapping. And we have to have very fine discipline, introspective access to our experiential states as well. Both are very difficult. But for the past 20 years, a lot of progress has been made in integrating information theory. Some predictions have been made and proven empirically as well. So there is a lot going for it. I see it not as a materialist theory of consciousness. I can tell you its creators do not see it like that and they have already come out in papers. It's writing things that basically imply. That they don't see it that way. The way I see is that it provides a map between numerous states direct experience and phenomenal states. Physical stuff, brain states, brain activity. If we have these mapping or to create this bridge between brain states and experiences, we can extrapolate it and infer what nature at large is in itself. Based on a notion shop in Harry, a notion that nature is also made of the same atoms and force use that constitute my brain. So we have good theoretical grounding to extrapolate.

Michael Shilo DeLay

But is the organization of those atoms that gives rise to the numinous experience in the first place? Like the particular biological organization of those atoms. Like you. I just feel like you're assuming that biological processes should be exhibited by inanimate objects as well.

Bernardo Kastrup

I don't understand why.

Michael Shilo DeLay

So few that. Well, you're saying that because we have both a phenomenological existence, and we also have a numinous to experience that all things, all bodies out there, everything in the external environment should also be able to be partitioned into these two pieces.

Bernardo Kastrup

Look. I do think what you said. But I. Didn't intend to justify this based on the discussion we had today. It's impossible. I wrote 12 books about it. There is there is a long argument, simple, but long based not only on reasoning, but a lot of empirical evidence. I tried to summarize it in the book. I just finished writing, which will come out in the next year called Analytic Idealism in a nutshell. In this discussion, I'm not trying to defend fully. Why I think what you just said. But you must believe me that I think this for good reasons. Very good and lyrical and analytic reasons. It's not an arbitrary thing. It's not an assumption. I'm not making an assumption which was the word you used? No, this is a conclusion I arrived at having pondered this problem from many different directions. And I'm not alone in this either.

Michael Shilo DeLay

No, of course. I mean, it's a huge topic. And I've gotten a little bit closer to understanding it. I mean, of course, it's something you've written 12 books about. We've only been talking for I think we've been talking for three hours probably now. And there's just there's no way that we're going to get into every single corner of that enormous universe.

Anastasia Bendebury

I think what might make sense is when the book is published first to read it so that we have the starting point of the analytic idealism in a nutshell and be able.

Bernardo Kastrup

To send it to you if you don't tell anyone who can send it to you because the production is done. It's just marketing now, you know, when a book is formally released, it becomes old news very quickly. So that's why they hold on with the formal release in order to do the traditional marketing, you know, trying to get the shelf space in bookshops and all that.

Anastasia Bendebury

You know, send it to us. No, no, no. Send it to us so that we have the basis for the next conversation, because I think that you're one of the best. You're one of the clearest thinkers that we've encountered on this so far because there's many people that talk about non dualism, and it's very hard to really dig down to what it is that they're trying to say. But you approach it with the rigor of philosophy. And so you have worked through all of these things. You have defined everything clearly. You have structured the argument in such a way where when we get down to the definitions and like Shilo said, he's like, okay, so if you define physics this way, then it all makes sense. And so I just I want to be able to have a deeper grasp of it because I think that it is speaking to something. Very, very important about the world and our own experience in it.

Michael Shilo DeLay

The way that we study the world and the way that we manipulate the world in our favor.

Anastasia Bendebury

Yeah, absolutely.

Bernardo Kastrup

I've been in the public eye associated with non dualism. I think because people one realized that there are many similarities between your philosophy and what I'm talking about. But also because of a personal friendship I have with Rupert Byron. And we have appeared together many times. So there is this association between me and known dualism, but I am pretty spiritually handicapped. It's very difficult to move my state of consciousness off the analytical baseline I have succeeded in doing that with major doses of psilocybin mushrooms. Because I needed to know that there was something else other than my baseline state of consciousness. But I'm. Very hard anchored on this analytic state of mind, very difficult to move me off that. So I'm literally spiritually handicapped and I am a spiritual catastrophe. I'm just I was not born with the skills or I don't know, I can't get there. So I come at this purely. From an analytical and political perspective and have lived and breathed science. Very early on, my very first job in life was at CERN and in the Atlas Collaboration mid-nineties. And so that's why you probably resonate with it more because it's probably your history as well. And I have difficulties when there are spiritual people in my audience and they ask me questions that arise from very deep introspective states that I have difficulty relating with and I sort of reword their question and flatten it in order to make it sort of conceptually clear. And of course, that can be dissatisfying to them because they immediately realize, I burn out of this and get it. And yes, you know, it's been our decision. Get it? You know, they're not who has these issues.

Anastasia Bendebury

I think it speaks to the necessity of finding someone who speaks your language to be able to understand an idea. Because I have a similar experience with the spiritual perspective where I have a very hard time grasping the substance of what is being asked or what is being wanted. Because perhaps I also am deeply resistant to a spiritual perspective of that kind. And so I really value the work that you're doing and the insights that you bring to the world. And I hope that you send us the book.

Bernardo Kastrup

I would do so. An electronic version. It has not been printed yet.

Anastasia Bendebury

Excellent.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Yeah. Maybe we'll catch up on the jargon and the terminology. So we want to, we can blast through some of that and get right to the heart of matters next time we talk to you.

Bernardo Kastrup

I use no neologisms. I have an analogy for neologism. There are people. Who said, Oh, Bernard, you should call your philosophy. What was that again? Oh, I forgot. Some kind of cosmic psychism. And it was like, there is a perfectly good word that has been used for five centuries. Why would they do that? So, no, you will find no neologisms with me. I'm not a Heidegger. No. No neologisms. And there would be some jargon. Because jargon is sometimes just so incredibly handy. But even in those cases, I define it at first usage. So you see what I mean?

Anastasia Bendebury

Excellent. I look forward to it.

Michael Shilo DeLay

All right, man. It's always illuminating talking to you. Thank you so much for coming by.

Bernardo Kastrup

You're very welcome. And you're very sincere hosts. And you're not just interviewing me. You're trying to grasp it. You're trying to occupy my perspective in the world as much as I'm trying to occupy yours. That makes it a much more dynamic and interesting, as opposed to just a list of questions that you thought of in advance.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Now we're just trying to understand the world, same as anybody. So that's why we do this. And let me bring everybody along. So, yeah, thanks to everybody who's listening for being part of this, too. There's a lot of people who are trying to understand how the world works. And yeah, thanks for contributing.

Bernardo Kastrup

It's been a pleasure. Thanks for.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Having me. Have a good rest. Nice to meet.

Bernardo Kastrup

You, too. Take care.

Michael Shilo DeLay

Bye bye.