I’m saying that the world is mental, it’s not physical. But when you observe the world, the world becomes represented to you upon observation in the form that we call physicality. Physicality is a cognitive representation, not the world as it is in itself.
Dr. Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work is based on the concept of metaphysical idealism, meaning that reality is in consciousness. He PhDs in ontology and philosophy of mind and in computer engineering focusing on reconfigurable computing and artificial intelligence). Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories. He has also been active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years. Bernardo co-founded a parallel processor company called Silicon Hive and worked as a technology strategist for ASML, a company that develops and manufactures machines the produce computer chips.
Bernardo’s ideas have been featured on Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, and Big Think. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com.
In this interview, Bernardo explains some of the concepts behind the idea that consciousness is the basis of reality. A transcript follows the video controls.
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Maybe let’s start with your criticism of those scientists who interpret brain images. Please explain what is your criticism about the interpretation of brain imaging studies.
I think there is nothing wrong with interpreting brain imaging from a scientific perspective. That’s the primary way to study the mind, because our only access to someone else’s mind is brain imaging, fMRI, MEG, EEG, PET and so on. So I have nothing against that. I think where we go wrong is when scientists begin doing philosophy and saying that the brain is what generates the mind. Well, wait a moment, there is a correlation between the two. We can learn a lot about one from the other. In other words, we can learn a lot about the mind from brain imaging, but when we interpret that correlation as implying a certain causation, like the brain causes the mind, that’s when we will artificially narrow our horizons. And I think that is unjustified. That’s a philosophical step, and it’s a bad one. There are plenty of reasons to think that the brain does not generate the mind, but the brain is what the mind looks like when it’s observed from the outside. The brain is the image of the mind. It’s the cognitive representation we make of another mind, not the generator of the mind.
Can you explain us what is universal consciousness? How do you define that? What is it?
Well, I use the words universal consciousness sometimes because they are perfectly descriptive. It’s a consciousness and it has no boundaries within the physical universe. A more technical way to describe it would be a field of subjectivity that has no spatial bounds, a spatially unbound field of subjectivity that underlies all nature and because we are part of nature that field of subjectivity underlies us and that’s why we are essentially subjective creatures we are mental creatures and our mentation when observed from the outside looks like a physical body a brain and brain activity
Am I wrong if I say that your views are close to Spinoza’s views.
They are close but they are not the same. The way Spinoza today is interpreted is as a dual-aspect monist, or a multiple-aspect monist, meaning that he doesn’t see mind and physicality as primary. Both mind and physicality are aspects of a third mysterious thing that he calls God or the divinity. I don’t think we need yet another thing, a mysterious thing, to make sense of empirical experience, empirical reality, I think mind is enough. We have to grant that there is a world beyond our individual minds. There clearly is a world you and I inhabit, a world that would still be here even if we were not around. A world that does what it does irrespective of whether we like it or not. A world that doesn’t answer to our fantasies, our desires, or our anxieties and fears. That world exists, and it’s beyond our own individual minds. But it doesn’t need to be non-mental. You believe in the existence of my thoughts, but my thoughts, although mental, are outside your mind. From your perspective, my thoughts are objective. They would still be there even if you were not here right now. And you can’t change my thoughts merely by wishing them to be different.
So my thoughts, from your perspective, are outside your individual mind, and they are objective, even though my thoughts are mental, from their own perspective. The same applies to the world. I think there is an outside world, objective from our point of view, but from its own point of view, it is subjective. It’s mental, and its mental activity presents itself to our observation as what we call the physical world. So I wouldn’t go along with Spinoza in postulating that there is something even different than meditation and physicality. We don’t need to do that. I think it just worsens the problem. But at the same time, I think if I could sit on the side of a canal in Amsterdam and have a conversation with Spinoza for an afternoon, I think we would agree that actually what he means is very close to what I mean, because the way he uses the term mind implies human mind. And yes, the human mind is a reducible aspect of this spatially unbound field of subjectivity that underlies all nature. And then I would agree human minds and physicality are merely aspects of this universal consciousness.
What can we learn from the cases of people suffering from dissociative disorders about the reality?
Dissociation happens when what is originally one mind seems to fragment itself into multiple centers of awareness, alters, as they are called in the psychiatric literature. Dissociative identity disorder used to be called multiple personality disorder, which is usually a reaction to trauma in which the mind of a person cannot accommodate all the input, including the trauma, so it has to fragment itself to compartmentalize experience. It’s a defense mechanism. But what it shows us is that one mind Can seem to be many distinct minds the alters of a patient with DID They can partake in the same dream from their own perspective and see each other as Characters in the same dream they can interact and talk to each other even club each other over the head And I would submit to you that this is exactly what’s happening right now. We are alters of this spatially unbound field of subjectivity of universal consciousness and that’s why I can’t read your thoughts and you can’t read mine and why I don’t know what’s happening in the galaxy of Andromeda. We are dissociated. People with dissociation can become literally blind to what is right in front of their open and working eyes.
That’s research done in Germany in 2015. Dissociation is literally blinding in the sense that it makes you unable to see what’s right in front of you let alone the thoughts of another person or what’s happening in galaxy of Andromeda. So I think life is the image of dissociation. Life is what a dissociative process in the mind of nature looks like. And it’s you and it’s me.
If I understand you correctly, psychedelics kind of reverse this dissociation. Can you explain how do they fit into your worldview?
Psychedelics are known to reduce brain activity, only reduce brain activity, not increase brain activity anywhere, and brain activity taken as a whole, not particular bands of brain activity. And at the same time, the psychedelic experience is much richer and intenser than baseline experience. So, while you are having the experience of your life, one of the most memorable of your life, your brain’s effectively gone to sleep, I mean, more than sleep, because your brain is still active when you are asleep, but during a psychedelic trance, your brain is really largely shut down. How can we account for that? I think some of what we call patterns of brain activity are the dissociative process itself in action. Not only the contents of the dissociation, but the dissociative process itself. And I think psychedelics impair that. Psychedelics reduce the dissociation itself, rendering us more receptive to our cognitive environment. Because when the dissociation is impaired, the dissociative boundary becomes more porous permeable and we experience things that are beyond the ego self and and that’s why there is less brain activity because the brain activity that is reduced correlates with the dissociative process itself and psychedelics impair that dissociation.
Do you think there are any kind of empirical research which could prove your theory of reality? So is there any any way of research which could do that?
In philosophy, to prove is a very big word because you can always find a completely implausible but coherent alternative to make sense of any phenomenon. So prove is something you can do in predictive science. When you say nature will behave this and that way, then you do an experiment. If nature does behave that way, then you can say, okay, then my theory is not disproven. Even in science, they say that it’s proven. We know it’s anti-scientific. The scientific theories can be disproven, never proven. But there is empirical research that can indicate very strongly that what I’m saying is true. One is psychedelic research. Another one is foundations of physics, which has been showing already for 40 years of repeated experimentation that physical entities do not exist prior to measurement. Physical entities are the outcome of measurement. Before you measure the world, the world is not physical, it’s something else. Physicality is a representation that arises from an act of measurement. And that’s completely consistent with what I’m saying. I’m saying that the world is mental, it’s not physical. But when you observe the world, the world becomes represented to you upon observation in the form that we call physicality. Physicality is a cognitive representation, not the world as it is in itself.
How do you see the role of psychedelics in the future? What can they do to human civilization?
They can help us mature, become more adult, because a psychedelic experience, when you have the first one later in life, in your mid-30s or 40s, they open doors in your mind that you didn’t even know existed. They help you become a more complete version of yourself, integrate all these different aspects of yourself that you didn’t even suspect were there. And that increases your understanding and empathy for other people because if you have all those skeletons in your cupboard then you understand other people’s skeletons and their other traits. So I think it’s a tool to help us mature and we desperately need it because we are a teenage civilization. There are lots of septuagenarian teenagers running around. Some of them are presidents of the most powerful nations on this planet.
Are you optimistic about the future of humankind in general?
I’m neutral. I think we may be on the verge either of destruction or of fantastically positive change, but I don’t know which way it will go. I really don’t.
Do you think your theory can bring us towards a question that to me is one of the most interesting questions and I saw that we would never understand is why My consciousness is in my head and your consciousness is in yours and Peter’s and his and you know Why not a hundred years ago and maybe why not me her and her so why am I looking out of this?
That’s a very interesting question Why is my consciousness here and your consciousness there another way to frame the question is if my father had the pet being a different guy would this right here be a different consciousness and And if you think about it without prejudice, without conceptual narratives telling you that these questions don’t make sense or they have trivial answers, you realize how profound the question actually is. My answer is the following. Your consciousness is not in your head. Your head is not a receptacle or a kind of cup where you put your consciousness in. Your consciousness is not in your head. It’s the other way around. Your head is in your consciousness and my consciousness and his consciousness because we can see you. The head, the body, is what our mental inner life looks like when represented on the screen of perception. It’s a symbol for our minds, and it correlates with our minds because the image of a phenomenon correlates with the thing it is the image of, right? Flames correlate with combustion because they are what combustion looks like. Heads correlate with consciousness, human consciousness, because heads are what human consciousness looks like. So, your consciousness is not in your head. Your head is a symbol, a representation of your consciousness, and therefore the question disappears. Your consciousness is not even in space-time, because space-time are the dimensions, the paradigm of the representations, not the dimensions or the scaffolding of the world as it is in itself. Mind is not in space-time, only physical things are. So, that’s the way to circumvent the question is to understand that your consciousness is not located. It’s like saying the pilot is located in a certain dial on the dashboard. No, no, no, the dashboard is a representation of the world where the pilot actually is. The physical world is a dashboard representation. You as a mind is not on the representation, is not in space-time, for the same reason that the pilot is not in the dashboard. We are in the world that is represented, and our heads are part of that representation. They are a symbol of our presence in the world as it is in itself.
