I couldn't make up my mind whether Tim Freke was a monistic Idealist or a dualist. On investigation I found a podcast (
https://timfreke.podbean.com/e/idealism-vs-emergent-spirituality/) where I discovered that though once an Idealist, he calls his current philosophy "emergent spirituality" (so that isn't just a phrase he mentioned in the interview with Alex).
Anyway, In the podcast I've just linked to, he has a debate with David Websdell, who regards himself as an Idealist. I was surprised that neither of them seem to be aware of Bernardo Kastrup, particularly Websdell, who thinks of himself as holding to a philosophy (Idealism) that "dare not speak its name". He's apparently unaware that Bernardo -- also an idealist -- is getting a fair amount of traction in the scientific press, including a number of fairly recent articles in
Scientific American.
I find Tim's philosophy very confusing; I don't really know what he is saying, and at times, he speaks almost like a materialist. He throws in the word
paralogical, which is a form of reasoning not dependent on logic, and constantly flits about from this to that without seemingly being able to describe what his philosophy actually is in coherent terms. Maybe he does somewhere and I just haven't found it? If so, please do let me know.
I'm with him that evolution seems a fact, but am convinced that Darwinism can't explain it (except at very low levels, such as speciation events, though not at the higher levels of the formation of body plans). I also agree that evolution seems to occur at all levels in all realms: in organic forms as well as in ideas and culture and so on. How there could possibly be anything more fundamental than consciousness I just can't see from his line of argument.
What, for one thing, is
perception? For me, it's a faculty of consciousness
apparently instantiated as what we call perceptive organs such as eyes and ears, etc. We live in a world of only
apparent instantiation. The world of the "objective" is just the way things appear to our perceptions. We attribute
causality to independently existing objects or "things", but they aren't causes, so much as appearances that we fit into our explanatory model of reality. The brain, for instance, doesn't
cause consciousness, but is how the process of consciousness appears to us from a certain perspective -- Bernardo's "second person" perspective -- which we take as a part of objective reality. But actually, it's just how the processes occurring in Mind At Large (MAL) appear to our perception as its dissociated alters.
The whole idea of "subjective" and "objective" is misconceived. It presupposes subjectivity and objectivity, when there's actually just the one thing, namely consciousness, either that of the One (MAL), or of its dissociated alters ("organic beings", including ourselves). The world of the
inorganic (apparently insentient objects and forces) is just our second-person perspective of the inner, first-person, workings of MAL, which appear to our perception as patterns and regularities that it is the purpose of science to investigate and model.
If the materialist agenda were simply to accept that we can only
model reality (and then often only roughly) rather than dogmatically insist that the models
are reality, we'd find ourselves in a saner place than we find ourselves within the paradigm of materialism. It's not so much that materialism is wrong, as that it's like a person with greatly defective eyesight imagining that he can see with 20/20 vision. He thinks his images are sharp, even crystal clear, when in fact they're often extremely blocky and vague.
It might be true that over time these images become a little clearer (i.e. that evolution of ideas occurs), but we're still a very long way from the truth. To make progress in science, at some point we're going to have to accept that materialism isn't the master of understanding from which all wisdom proceeds, but rather just a clumsy and fumbling handmaiden of truth. IMO, things will only start to become usefully clearer when science drops materialism, with which it's gone pretty much as far as it can go; currently, I think it's becoming an active impediment to making further progress.
Just as sterile religion may concretise around an initial genuine spiritual impulse, the initially exciting and fruitful impulse of science is now rapidly degenerating into sterility, into scientism. I'm
not saying we have to drop science, only what has been for a few centuries its main guiding principle, namely materialism. Thanks to Bernardo, I can sense just a little light at the end of the tunnel.