Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, Idealism vs Materialism

[stratos]

I came across this conversation with Kastrup and from 53:03 and on with the thought experiment of pipes he summarises an objection to materialism that can be risen in the exact same way to HIS philosophy too. So the question of how pipes and valves can give rise to consciousness become how pipes and valves give rise to dissociation, and here Kastrup seems to have no respond (he just says something irrelevant about the uniqueness of carbon based chemicals and metabolism, whatever...). He seems to me that he mocks materialism about it and then proceeds to accept the same magic about dissociation. What's your opinion? And one more note, another problematic point you can find (among many others) is the part in which he speaks about a neuron being an arbitrary categorization and then proceeds to accept the brain as whole as being something that it like to be it (53:03 and on). But brain is an arbitrary categorization TOO, and in order to claim otherwise you have to pin point why a pipe (a neuron) does not give rise to dissociation and two or more (a brain) do....And here we are again with the same problems of materialism...

[Hedge90]

Dissociation has one advantage in comparison to materialism though: that there is no qualitative difference between the universal and the dissociated, i.e. between your consciousness and the "matter" it arises from. Otherwise, yes, BK is yet to come up with the mechanics of this dissociation.
I myself am not entirely convinced by the dissociation concept, to me "attention" is an equal or better candidate to explaining limited subjective experience. I imagine that as the universal consciousness concentrates on certain loci of experience, it can become lost in that experience and "forget itself", and life offers a very complex set of experiences. In my mind it's like when you have a trip, and you look at something and you start melding with it, or entering it as a whole microcosm - I once explored my carpet that became a whole forest with flora and fauna from the inside for 15-20 minutes, forgetting that I'm actually sitting in my room and just looking at the floor.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Bernardo actually shared his tjump interview in the old MS forum, which generated some discussion that may be of interest. As Hedge points out, BK is making an argument based on there being only one ontological category, i.e. Mind, and so avoids the so-called 'hard problem' of having to appeal to 2 categories, one being mind, and the other being a material realm of non-mind from which minds emerge. Whereas, in using 'dissociation' as an analogy/proof of concept to show that one irreducible mind can take on the apparency of multiple loci of mind, it only involves 1 ontological category, that being Mind. However, that analog is not meant to be an explication of that process.

[Ben Iscatus]

Isn't that what pipes and valves do? Allow separation and alteration of the flow of water?

But in any case Dissociation is simply known from experience - it does actually happen, as where DID is explored by neuroscience. The association of pipes and valves or computer circuits into Conscious experience, on the other hand, has not been observed.

Strictly speaking, neurons are unnecessary - after all, in analytic idealism, they're only a partial image or representation of something deeper. An amoeba has no neurons, but it shows all the signs of having experiences.

[Steve Petermann]

I think I can understand why Bernardo took up the analogy of dissociation. It offers a readily available picture of the One mind becoming many. However, it breaks down very quickly when we consider his ontology of Mind-at-Large. In his ontology, M@L is undifferentiated. There is no association to be dissociated from.

Instead, here's an alternative analogy/metaphor that might be more apt. It references the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, the entropy of the system will never decrease. A rough-and-ready way to describe high entropy is a state of high disorder or low complexity. Such a state of high entropy looks random (no discernable pattern). Now, obviously, in the universe, there are low entropy states of high complexity. The brain is a remarkable example of this. However, for a state to become or maintain a low entropy state there must be an injection of heat (in thermodynamics) or information (information entropy).

So, instead of dissociation, one could think of low entropy states (high complexity) forming. Instead of a dissociative boundary, there would be an entropic boundary where complexity breaks down thus leading to the lack of direct information flow. The question then is what causes this formation of low entropy states? One option would be random chance. The other would be teleology.

To illustrate here's an image of the Go board:



So, how did this configuration come about? We could think of having a random vibration mechanism vibrating the board and over time this configuration came about. The other is obviously that the minds of players created this. To the unknowledgeable viewer, this board just looks random (no discernable pattern) appearing to be of high entropy(low complexity). (Here we can also think of the inference from a reductionist perspective in quantum mechanics where, from a very limited perspective, the sequence events doesn't seem to have a pattern). However, for those who understand the game, the pattern is very evident and is of low entropy (high complexity). In other words, though it may not be apparent from limited knowledge and perspective, there is a teleology at work. In this case, the low entropy(complexity) is created and maintained because information is constantly injected into the system.

In my view, this dynamic of entropy is part of what divine mentation is doing, thus a divine idealism. Instead of an undifferentiated M@L (with chance at work), there is (metaphorically speaking) a complex mind, the mind of God constantly and teleologically shaping the complexity we see.

However, another thing we can glean from entropy is that not just anything goes. There are constraints. If entropy decreases (more complexity) somewhere there must be an increase in entropy elsewhere. There is a holistic connectedness at work. This is similar to what the Born rule tells us about the probability distribution available for quantum events. In divine idealism, this means that God has made a commitment to a certain type of life (what I call a Divine Life). It is within that commitment that life proceeds where personal freedom, moral realism, meaning, and purpose occur.

[Ben Iscatus]

Very interesting, Steve - a very useful metaphor! But where you say MAL is undifferentiated and "there is no association to be dissociated from", it seems to me that you are creating a problem that need not exist. A whole rubber band can be chopped up. If you're suggesting that a rubber band is composed of individual associated molecules, I think this would be to stretch the metaphor beyond its elastic limit.

[Steve Petermann]

Very interesting, Steve - a very useful metaphor! But where you say MAL is undifferentiated and "there is no association to be dissociated from", it seems to me that you are creating a problem that need not exist. A whole rubber band can be chopped up. If you're suggesting that a rubber band is composed of individual associated molecules, I think this would be to stretch the metaphor beyond its elastic limit.

I didn't quite follow your rubber band objection but what I was trying to illustrate is that with human dissociation there is a complex associated mind to begin with. With M@L that isn't the case.

[Ben Iscatus]

with human dissociation there is a complex associated mind to begin with. With M@L that isn't the case.

OK then, although a human mind has apparently evolved from earlier animal minds, when it comes to an amoeba, which can display much of the behaviour of a complex animal, what would you say that is associated from?

[Steve Petermann]

OK then, although a human mind has apparently evolved from earlier animal minds, when it comes to an amoeba, which can display much of the behaviour of a complex animal, what would you say that is associated from?

My view is that everything from quarks to amoebas to humans and ETs is a mental creation, an imagined entity in the mind of God.

[Cleric K]

I think I can understand why Bernardo took up the analogy of dissociation. It offers a readily available picture of the One mind becoming many. However, it breaks down very quickly when we consider his ontology of Mind-at-Large. In his ontology, M@L is undifferentiated. There is no association to be dissociated from.

Instead, here's an alternative analogy/metaphor that might be more apt. It references the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, the entropy of the system will never decrease. A rough-and-ready way to describe high entropy is a state of high disorder or low complexity. Such a state of high entropy looks random (no discernable pattern). Now, obviously, in the universe, there are low entropy states of high complexity. The brain is a remarkable example of this. However, for a state to become or maintain a low entropy state there must be an injection of heat (in thermodynamics) or information (information entropy).

So, instead of dissociation, one could think of low entropy states (high complexity) forming. Instead of a dissociative boundary, there would be an entropic boundary where complexity breaks down thus leading to the lack of information flow. The question then is what causes this formation of low entropy states? One option would be random chance. The other would be teleology.

To illustrate here's an image of the Go board:

So, how did this configuration come about? We could think of having a random vibration mechanism vibrating the board and over time this configuration came about. The other is obviously that the minds of players created this. To the unknowledgeable viewer, this board just looks random (no discernable pattern) appearing to be of high entropy(low complexity). (Here we can also think of the inference from a reductionist perspective in quantum mechanics where, from a very limited perspective, the sequence events doesn't seem to have a pattern). However, for those who understand the game, the pattern is very evident and is of low entropy (high complexity). In other words, though it may not be apparent from limited knowledge and perspective, there is a teleology at work. In this case, the low entropy(complexity) is created and maintained because information is constantly injected into the system.

In my view, this dynamic of entropy is part of what divine mentation is doing, thus a divine idealism. Instead of an undifferentiated M@L (with chance at work), there is (metaphorically speaking) a complex mind, the mind of God constantly and teleologically shaping the complexity we see.

However, another thing we can glean from entropy is that not just anything goes. There are constraints. If entropy decreases (more complexity) somewhere there must be an increase in entropy elsewhere. There is a holistic connectedness at work. This is similar to what the Born rule tells us about the probability distribution available for quantum events. In divine idealism, this means that God has made a commitment to a certain type of life (what I call a Divine Life). It is within that commitment that life proceeds where personal freedom, moral realism, meaning, and purpose occur.

Very nice, Steve! Entropy is a really good metaphor. Like most metaphors based on scientific concepts it's a double edged sword. Those who have worked deeply enough to get a good feeling of what entropy is, very often are very much attached to the intellectual scientific outlook and have the least predisposition to lift the abstract laws into a metaphor for living spiritual dynamics. On the other hand, those who are open for the living spiritual dynamics, very often don't know what to make out of terms like entropy. Hopefully this chasm will be gradually bridged.

I'll take the liberty to extend your metaphor ever further. The fact that the Go player sees order on the board, where others see only randomness has to do with the individual's consciousness. There's no need to speculate here how the brain's entropy maps to that. We're building a metaphor for directly experienced phenomena. What about our own thoughts? Certainly we find order there, as long as we think logically (the experience of logic/harmony is like a measure for the entropy/order of thoughts) but as thinking is applied against the World Content (the contents of consciousness) there's also chaos. And this is actually key. We can't really speak about the World Content in itself as being ordered or chaotic. It is our thinking about the World Content which we experience in that way! The regular person observes the go board and his thinking conceives only randomness. The Go player observes the same board but his thinking weaves lower entropy meaning through the stones. This unites the disparate perceptions of the stones into higher order patterns full of meaning. So chaos and order is really up to the entropy of our own cognition and the patterns of meaningful order that we're able to discern within the World Content.

But why stop here? Above we were looking at thinking in relation to perceptions (the Go board) but thoughts themselves are also part of the World Content - we do perceive our thoughts. The same logic can be applied, although the method of observation becomes more challenging. When we think about sensory perceptions there's comfortable distance between our thinking and them. When we turn attention to thinking everything becomes much more challenging. The Ouroboros is biting its tail! We try to grasp what we ourselves produce, we're always 'one step behind', the thought that we perceive is already our past thought - our current thinking is the invisible one which perceives its former state and reflects on it. It is challenging but it is not impossible. We only need to change our habits of thinking. As long as we want to grasp thinking in the comfortable and static way in which we grasp Go stones, we stand no chance. We need new skills, we need to cognitively dance in our spiritual activity.

Let's return to entropy. Just as the Go stones seem random and the top-level of reality for the 'uninitiated' in the game, so our thoughts seem like more or less logical sequences of thought-stones yet they form a top-level of reality for us. Could it be that just as consciousness can develop towards lower entropy and grasp the higher order patterns of the Go board, so we can develop spiritually and grasp even lower entropy strata of reality which reveal higher orders within our own consciousness and respectively the World Content? The Initiates in all ages, all over the World have always answered positively to this question. One can say "It is not possible to experience knowingly anything of lower entropy than our thoughts!" But where this certainty comes from? For someone who knows these things from firsthand experience, any such statements sound like someone staring at the Go board and declaring "It's nonsense that there's some order in this board. You who speak of some order in the board are simply mistaking your own fantasies of some hoped for order in the board, for actual order". Well, any Go player knows that such a statement comes only from the person's own unwillingness to learn something about the game. In reality he wants to justify his own ignorance by declaring everyone else being delusional, so that he can rest blissfully without feeling the need to exert any effort.

Things are practically the same when we speak of higher cognition. All our ordinary states of consciousness are nothing but higher entropy (thus seemingly more complex, random, less holistic) decohered patterns of higher order, lower entropy states of being. Any attempts to convince ourselves that such lower entropy states are impossible is nothing but the Go player who prefers that everyone is delusional, rather than putting some effort and learning something about the game.

Up to this point we're presenting nothing but a metaphor. In order for it to become reality we need to relate everything to living experiences. It is extraordinarily interesting that physics recognizes the Sun as the source of low entropy energy. It is what drives all the processes down the gradient until the ultimate heat dissipation. All this becomes astonishingly real when it is translated to living experience. There's an inner Sun which is the source of low 'spiritual entropy'. This is practically what you theologically call the Divine Mind (the Divine Logos). Here we not only speak of it but also show precisely how we can enter in living communion with it.

I won't go into details here how we can practically approach these higher states. I've done that in many other places. I'll just relate it from yet another angle which links beautifully with what we're talking here. No amount of intellectual exertion will lower our entropy. The more we build thoughts upon thoughts, the more we only raise our entropy, everything becomes more complicated. Thus your intuition is right, that there's no need to complicate things. Yet we can't lower our entropy by simply pushing away all conscious contents and focusing on nebulous feelings either. In this way we can stabilize our state at a certain threshold but the only way we can truly lower the entropy is by finding a low entropy Source. This source is the Sun - in both physical and spiritual sense.

What we describe here is nothing other than prayer in the true sense of the word. As said many times elsewhere, true prayer has nothing to do with asking for favors from some God who might or might not be there. The prayer we're talking about here is an actual spiritual exercise that sets our soul and spirit in motion. It's actually the most pleasant and one of the most effective exercises, although it requires a certain level of openness. When we concentrate our thinking and imagine that we're practically bathing in this lower entropy spiritual Sun Light, we can clearly ask it - it is living and intelligent - to flow into us, to vivify, resuscitate, enlighten, heal every fiber of our body, every thought, every feeling. We shouldn't be tense and expect that something should happen. Such expectations only paralyze us. I guess everyone here has had experience of the following sort. Remember when someone threw something, for example a ball, and yells "watch out, it's falling!"? I guess most of us go for a very strange reflex that we simply freeze in place, we dare not to look upwards, we simply stiffen our body and wait in terror. Well, this is how we look when we perform exercises like these and can't get rid of the tension of expectation, that something must happen any moment. This tension practically blocks the very thing that we want to allow enter in us. The thing that we expect won't come from above or below, from the back or the side. It won't come from any direction that the intellect can conceive. In olden times people still had proper feeling for the within. Today this is practically lost in geometrical abstractions. The intellect imagines that within comes from the geometric interior of the body. This has nothing to do with the actual facts. The within we're speaking about can't be grasped by the intellect because the intellect itself exists only as ripples on the higher order waves of this within. Many people have intuition about this but they go in the way of the person declaring "there's no way to have conscious experience of the lower entropy states of the within". This way exists and it is only up to us to investigate it. If the description of this exercise makes us feel very uncomfortable, vulnerable, exposed - we're on the right track. It is the direction of our subjective depths that very few are willing to explore. Yet it is precisely this that we must do. Not in order to be drowned in the swamps of our lower nature but in order to connect with the Sun and illuminate them with lower entropy cognition.

These exercises don't have immediate effects. It's like sunbathing. We don't see results in real time but melanin gradually accumulates in the skin. So it is here. Gradually we begin to sense Imaginative flashes, glimpses of perspectives that put whole segments of our life into holistic panoramas. Disconnected life events, that we could never conceive as something holistic from the higher entropy state of intellectual speculation, are elucidated by the lower entropy Sun Light and we experience higher order logic in them. This is only a tiny aspect of a whole realm which throws light on the World Content through higher cognitive order.

These are only the very basic first steps into Imaginative cognition. There's no limit how far this process can go. Once we make even the smallest step into the direction of lower entropy integration, we immediately understand that this is what the whole evolutionary journey is about. It's the creative flow against the currents of rising entropy and reaching higher and higher orders of consciousness, where cognition lives in lower and lower entropy and as such is able to perceive clearly and meaningfully all the fragments within which we were previously moving as if within a labyrinth. Only in this way we can approach and experience within ourselves the lower entropy Divine Thoughts, which organize everything.

A word about complexity. There's a kind of reciprocity here. In higher entropy states, our own state of consciousness is out-of-phase with the states of other beings, the Natural world, etc. This makes it look like the World Content is tremendously complex. It is complex because we don't experience the logic, the inner coherence of everything we behold. Everything seems random. If we are to grasp this complicated picture intellectually we would have to hold in our mind infinite elements and relate them with the most complicated laws. Clearly this would crush us.

Conversely, when we rise in consciousness towards lower entropy, consciousness actually becomes simpler. Things become easier. The complexity of the World Content is still there, it even increases because there are so many more things that enter our consciousness, which previously we had no clue about. But now all this complexity is also intertwined with higher order harmony - actual higher logic. Everything is seen as harmonious parts logically propelled by Cosmic Thoughts of Divine Beings.

Seen in this way, our ordinary state of consciousness is nothing other than higher entropy state of the Divine Mind. Here we should be clear that the Divine Mind is not a monotonic thing. There are at least three clearly distinguishable levels of entropy within that Mind, which are Worlds in themselves. It is the same 'first-person' perspective everywhere, yet the entropy makes the World Content appear less or more chaotic. Here one can object "But it is arrogant to imagine that we share the same perspective as the Divine Mind! We need to be more humble!" The trouble with this objection is that the person thinks only of the Divine 'benefits' without realizing also the Divine responsibilities. When we see it right, the picture is actually inverted and the arrogance manifests precisely when we enclose ourselves in the imagined personal bubble of consciousness and delegate everything to the Divine. It's exactly humility and prayer which allow us to sacrifice our egoistic interests and allow the lower entropy of the Sun Being to inflow. Then, seeing (at least partially) the higher order picture of reality, we can begin to participate in a kind of creative work of Cosmic proportions that we simply can not even imagine, as long as we conceive that God created and sent us on Earth to have fun and endlessly speculate about His nature.

Once the lower entropy metaphor is understood not only as an allegory about something inherently inexplicable but as actual living experiential reality, then we also understand that all this has already inflown into the Earth evolution with the Christ impulse. The perfection that the Divine demands from us ("Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect") is not some vain polishing of our personal bubble of consciousness but the lowering of our entropy by the inflow of the Divine Sun within us, such that "that they may be one as we are one - I in them and you in me - so that they may be brought to complete unity." "Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods” ‘?" Everything in the gospels can be understood literally when it is seen from the proper perspective, illuminated by Sun Light. In the same way everything in science, including entropy, ceases to be mere metaphor for inexplicable feelings, reserved only for the cognition of the completely opaque Divine Mind, but become literal realities within our consciousness expanded into the lower entropy realms of the higher worlds.