Kastrup: Idea of the World

I have no idea whether this is relevant to this thread but I'll post it anyway.

As a child and into my teens I would think myself to sleep pondering things that worried - even scared - me. I believe it was trying to imagine death that was the start of it. Death worried and scared me then as it does now. One of the things that came up in my thoughts was to try to imagine, if we have a soul that is eternal, what eternity would be like to experience. That thought scared me as much as the alternative of death and total/instant oblivion.

Anyhow, at some point I reasoned that infinity and eternity are two words for the same thing. Moreover, the idea of something being "infinitely big" or "infinitely small" was meaningless - they too are both the same. The reasoning went: inifinity cannot be measured so size (or duration) have no meaning. I then took a step further and thought: if there is such a thing as infinity then everything we know is within it and is also imaginary because nothing really has actual measurements ... the measurements are invented (imagined).

These were (and probably still are) half-baked thoughts which arrived as revelations but without the necessary intellect to make sense of them. That's where Kastrup and the clever philosophers can take thoughts like that and formalise them into something coherent. Speaking of clever people, I do remember eventually reading about Einstein and relativity and had a eureka moment with regard to my thoughts on size in relation to infinity.

Kam,

Somehow I missed this post previously.  Your experiences as a child/teen imaging death/eternity closely mirror my own experiences when I was that age.  I remember, long before I knew anything about computers, it felt like my mind would go into an endless loop, tire quickly, and drop the line of thinking.  Remains a unique experience in my consciousness to this day.  It almost felt like the computer (or "software") was shutting down as a failsafe.

Still not something I've reconciled, but I've rarely (maybe never?) run into someone else who had the same experience.  Mind you, I didn't expect my experience was a novel/unique one but certainly seemed somewhat rare considering I brought this up a fair bit in my later teens/20's with contemporaries.  It never seemed to resonate.

Thanks for posting!  (As always)

[Ninshub]

I'm listening to this now and enjoying it.

I respect Bernardo's work, am glad for it and the richness and important insights it contains, but as soon as he starts discussing some of the differences between his philosophy and Tom's model of reality (at around 34 minutes), I see what I find problematic about it, or some of its limits. I already find problematic his insufficient and underdeveloped appreciation of individuated consciousness, but beyond that it's exactly his naturalism that I find at odds with survival data. The notion of an instinctive subjectivity all down the line with no higher level cognitive faculties until they evolve with mammals or humans. Then when Tom addresses these differences between them, he starts off by saying that of course they exist because he's built his own model from the fact that he's had meditation and OBE experiences - otherwise without them he would have intuited something like Bernardo.

IMO that's the problem of philosophical systems that don't take this data into account, they have to be flawed by that very fact - just like what I said about Tim Freke's recent turn (since 2020) in another thread, who's now also going into this sort of emergentism (although not fully leading to non-duality like Bernardo).

Nice to hear the dialogue anyway, the commonalities are probably greater, and I have great respect for both.

[Ninshub]

This just posted on the Spira channel:

Debate betweeen Kastrup/Spira (two aspects of the same steam of consciousness ) and Koch:

I am enjoying that discussion between Bernardo and Tom Cambell. Perhaps inevitably (because I am not a fan of Bernardo) I preferred what Tom had to say. I particularly liked his analogy with the internet - suggesting that we do have access to a huge field of knowledge - as we do on the internet - but we still have to discover how to get there!

I noticed Bernardo describing his early work at the LHC, in which he was involved in devising some electronics that could decide in 25 nanoseconds whether a particular event was old physics or new - i.e. whether it might represent evidence for a Higgs particle. I'm not sure how often a Higgs particle is generated at the LHC, but someone estimated that about 10^12 collisions need to be analysed to reveal one Higgs boson! That sounds broadly consistent I suppose with hardware that must make a decision every 25 nanoseconds.

However, I don't believe anything that requires 10^12 events to be filtered to produce one significant event - I simply don't! I'll expand a bit on that if needed.

Although that is not explicitly connected with his thoughts on consciousness, it helps to make me uneasy about Bernardo's judgement.

My big problem here is that I think science has to evolve in steps - driven by data. I suppose Tom is at least bringing some data from his explorations from OOBs, which also puts him ahead of Bernardo, and he also talks about the need to choose the simplest model of consciousness that fits the evidence.

That is the way science has evolved until fairly recently - if the model fits the facts you stop theorising until you have more data that shows a definite discrepancy with your model.

I also dislike Bernardo's concept that a unified consciousness underwent some sort of dissociative event to become several consciousnesses - using the experiences of people with multiple personality disorder! I prefer to think of such multiple personalities as examples in which several conscious entities have become linked to one brain. To me, a Dualistic model of reality will take us a long way, and let us learn a lot more about reality - then might be the time to consider a more sophisticated model.

The problem right now is that most scientists want to believe in materialism by explaining away all the tricky facts, so very little research gets done (just think what could be done with presentiment, or with many of the phenomena described in Irreducible Mind), while speculative theory runs away with its complexities.

[Ninshub]

This just posted on the Spira channel:

Debate betweeen Kastrup/Spira (two aspects of the same steam of consciousness ) and Koch:

At 1h03, the discussion (about whether there's consciousness in states like deep sleep where we can't report consciousness) goes into what happens with flat EEGs and Koch is still really stuck there. Pim Van Lommel (2001) is referenced. For Koch, reported NDEs had to occur after the brain rebooted otherwise it's "magic". Physicalist assumptions still very much in place.

At 1h03, the discussion (about whether there's consciousness in states like deep sleep where we can't report consciousness) goes into what happens with flat EEGs and Koch is still really stuck there. Pim Van Lommel (2001) is referenced. For Koch, reported NDEs had to occur after the brain rebooted otherwise it's "magic". Physicalist assumptions still very much in place.

I don't think Koch is explicitly physicalist, given this paper he co-authored:

Only what exists can cause: An intrinsic view of free will

This essay addresses the implications of integrated information theory (IIT) for free will. IIT is a theory of what consciousness is and what it takes to have it. According to IIT, the presence of consciousness is accounted for by a maximum of cause-effect power in the brain. Moreover, the way specific experiences feel is accounted for by how that cause-effect power is structured. If IIT is right, we do have free will in the fundamental sense: we have true alternatives, we make true decisions, and we - not our neurons or atoms - are the true cause of our willed actions and bear true responsibility for them. IIT's argument for true free will hinges on the proper understanding of consciousness as true existence, as captured by its intrinsic powers ontology: what truly exists, in physical terms, are intrinsic entities, and only what truly exists can cause.

But he does seem to have acquired that academic wariness toward any kind of personal afterlife.

[Ninshub]

Well at the beginning of the interview he describes his position as "physicalism".

[Ninshub]

To me, a Dualistic model of reality will take us a long way, and let us learn a lot more about reality - then might be the time to consider a more sophisticated model.

What do you think of Tom Campbell's model, though? Because it's clearly not dualistic and doesn't consider "matter" as fundamental in any way.

What do you think of Tom Campbell's model, though? Because it's clearly not dualistic and doesn't consider "matter" as fundamental in any way.

Well Tom was very quick at one point to state that his model was just the simplest model that fits the facts. However by contrast Bernardo seems so wedded to his ideas that a little matter like free will has to be reinterpreted to fit his ideas! This seems idiotic - I mean one of the big problems with materialism is that it can't really account for free will. Bernardo isn't a materialist, yet he has a problem with the concept of free will! He justifies abandoning the concept of free will by explaining that Loop Quantum Gravity (another abstract mathematical theory, that might get abandoned in due course as String Theory seems to be). doesn't have a time arrow!

For what it is worth, my hunch is that a whole collection of physics theories - plus some of its data (e.g. that derived from the LHC) - will need to be abandoned in the fullness of time - so basing the structure of the ultimate reality on what we think we know now, might be pretty stupid!

However neither of them (I think) mentioned NDE's, and they are a treasure trove of 'data' IMHO. NDE's are obviously Dualistic, so I would expect that the next level of reality after death is going to feel like another place from which the Earth can be observed, but which is invisible to us, except for people like Jurgen Ziewe, who seem to be able to explore it via OBE's. Even if the ultimate reality is Idealistic, that may be behind some structures that are better described Dualistically.

Now some NDE experiences do talk about timelessness, or of time being somehow strange up there. Nevertheless, things still happen sequentially in NDE's. What I do wonder is whether Earth time is for us, but that spirits enjoy a separate time axis, so that they can see a whole life (say) but still go away and tinker with things to 'improve' it in some sense. A lot of NDE's talk about better vision with more colours, and better hearing. I wonder if both these senses are crude approximations while we are alive. Maybe our sense of time is also a crude approximation to the time we experience (back) there?

I'm starting to ramble!

[Ninshub]

However neither of them (I think) mentioned NDE's, and they are a treasure trove of 'data' IMHO. NDE's are obviously Dualistic, so I would expect that the next level of reality after death is going to feel like another place from which the Earth can be observed, but which is invisible to us, except for people like Jurgen Ziewe, who seem to be able to explore it via OBE's. Even if the ultimate reality is Idealistic, that may be behind some structures that are better described Dualistically.

Now some NDE experiences do talk about timelessness, or of time being somehow strange up there. Nevertheless, things still happen sequentially in NDE's. What I do wonder is whether Earth time is for us, but that spirits enjoy a separate time axis, so that they can see a whole life (say) but still go away and tinker with things to 'improve' it in some sense. A lot of NDE's talk about better vision with more colours, and better hearing. I wonder if both these senses are crude approximations while we are alive. Maybe our sense of time is also a crude approximation to the time we experience (back) there?

Regarding time, I hear a lot of experiencers (NDEs, etc.) describe how things do happen sequentially in non-physical dimensions, but somehow there's no time - it's all Now. Both of those things at once, seemingly incomprehensible to our minds while in this virtual physical system.

When you say NDEs are "dualistic", though, I'm not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean they imply dualism between consciousness and matter, or are you referring to another kind of dualism?