Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe, and everything. John Hunt, Winchester, UK, 2014.
Bernardo Kastrup, The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. John Hunt, Winchester, UK, 2019.
Bernard Kastrup is a double Ph.D. with one in the philosophy of mind (ontology) and a second in computer engineering. He has worked for CERN and Philips Research Laboratory and published multiple academic papers. There are, Kastrup reminds us, tribes in the Amazon that have never been exposed to a materialist worldview. To them, the materialism so accepted by us seems like a strange fantasy. We ourselves dwell, however, in a culture dedicated to reinforcing and promoting a materialist consensus that may be no more than habituated conjecture. How our sense of an interior, continuous personal “awareness” and inner experience is derived from the operations within our physical brain, and whether this even is a cause-and-effect relationship, is now labeled by neuroscientists as the “hard problem of consciousness.”
Science magazine declared this to be the “second most important unanswered question in science.” In Kastrup’s view, it should have been named the first. He maintains that:
“When it comes to consciousness, nothing allows us to deduce the properties of subjective experience –the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire – from the mass, momentum, spin, charge, or any other property of subatomic particles bouncing around in the brain.”
This is the essence of the “hard problem of consciousness.” Consciousness itself, however, as ineffable as it is, is what distinguishes us from being mere “sophisticated biological robots.”
What has been the widely accepted materialist view holds that we live within a copy, or projection, of the actual physical world that is, in large part, our own personal projection. There is no strong reason however, Kastrup asserts, to believe this is really what is going on. Our sense of “materialism”, however, is derived entirely from viewing that same ephemeral “film.” The truth, according to Kastrup, is that even after decades of research we are still far away from demonstrating if, and how, our brains hypothetically “generate” our minds into existence. It isn’t clear that subjective experience correlates with our brain’s neural firings at all. In brief, there is, at present, no solid scientific basis for maintaining that consciousness can be reduced to being a by-product of matter. This is Kastrup’s view and one gaining prominence. In top physics laboratories around the world, Kastrup tells us, “physicalism” has become a controversial and soon perhaps outdated view.
On the contrary, consciousness itself may be the primary means, the “ground”, through which we come to believe we are experiencing “matter.” Kastrup sees the function of our brains as being to “localize” this far larger consciousness that exists beyond and outside the physical and connect it with a grid of “space-time reference points” that include our own physical bodies. If unbound, however, from this narrow focus, mind can encompass all that exists across space and time and even beyond them. To Kastrup, each human mind is a ‘node” of an infinitely far greater consciousness. Our personal “localized” awareness tends to filter out almost all of the vastness we can potentially be aware of and concentrate instead on the wants and needs of our physical bodies. Almost all else is normally beyond our usual day-by-day awareness as if on the far side of a screen.
Surprisingly, it is the calming of our minds, rather than the intensification of their activity, that opens the door to such expanded awareness, of journeys into the depths of “mind.” This far greater expanse of ultimate mind is, according to Kastrup, “the source of our shared fathomless “collective unconscious” Under the right conditions, the wall that separates our own personal “node” of consciousness from this infinitely greater ocean of awareness that lies beyond it can break down. All “physical” “material” things and structures, Kastrup maintains, are themselves, in addition, the products of mind. This leads in turn to his hypothesis that there is ultimately only one mind (“Mind”) within which existence unfolds. To restate Kastrup’s view even more succinctly, “‘Reality’ is the result of mind in action, of the ‘unfolding’ of mind.”
“If there ever was a perfect candidate to be sliced clean out of existence by Occam’s razor,” Kastrup declares “it ought to be the notion that an entire un-provable universe exists outside of mind.” What Kastrup calls “idealism” entails, conversely, that all of reality, all of existence, is actually “within mind”, generated from out of its unifying sub-strata. There is, he asserts, no “stuff” that is apart from mind. This, however, he believes, does not deny that all reality unfolds within mind according to stable patterns and regularities we have come to call the “laws of nature.” The actions of mind itself, to Kastrup, obey the laws of physics. Aspects of the mind that are beyond our personal awareness and control, he believes, ‘project” what we perceive as our shared “external” world.
We overlay this underlying fabric with, in Kastrup’s words, “an intricate web of concepts derived from language” and dwell almost always “inside a self-woven conceptual cocoon that insulates us from raw reality.” The “reality” we come to know tends to be limited by our subjective perceptions. The notion of objective matter, Kastrup holds, is our attempt to make sense of certain patterns and regularities observable in our mental imagery. It is because we dwell within the same underlying fabric of “larger mind” that we live as if we are inhabiting the same shared physical world rather than our own personal projection. The emanation of the world from out of a deeper unity that we experience still, Kastrup tells us, operates in accord with the laws of physics, light, and energy that comprise the “inner architecture” of our universe
This underlying awareness, in relation to which our own minds are “one-apple-on-a -far-greater-tree” is at the root of what Kastrup calls “TWE”, “That Which Experiences”, our subjective experience that exists inside each of us. Our own “experiences”, Kastrup maintains, are not really distinct from TWE itself, in the same way, that ripples are not separate from water. Ultimately, TWE, despite its transitory aggregation into our fleeting individual “personalities” is actually nothing other than universal consciousness. The world we feel we experience is a merging and inter-weaving of our personal choices and projections with this shared underlying ground of all existence. While the ocean of the cosmos, in all its multiple dimensions, is the ultimate reality, the individual thought waves upon that sea, to which we contribute, are, Kastrup tells us, integral as well to our experience of the unfolding of that reality.
Next: The Untethered Soul