Mod+ 248. BERNARDO KASTRUP SAYS MATERIALISM IS BALONEY

Kai, I haven't really looked into neutral monism before. I've had a brief glance at the first link you posted and it doesn't strike me as something that one could grasp as readily as material or idealistic monism, so I can't say too much about that at the moment. I'm also wondering if Ian T's ideas fall into this category.

The Wikipedia entry starts with this:

Neutral monism is the metaphysical view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral", that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical; these neutral elements might have the properties of color and shape, just as we experience those properties, but these shaped and colored elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own.

Initially, I'm noticing that there is a multiplicity of elements, and that it's not monistic in the same sense as I tend to apprehend it in Idealism: vaguely, there seems to be a "thingness" about it, albeit that those things are at bottom composed of one kind of substance and have various kinds of interrelationships.

I notice that Bertrand Russell is a historical figure associated with it, and he self-described as an agnostic in philosophical discourse and an atheist in popular discourse (according to Wiki again); he was also a humanist who thought that religion could cause at least as much harm as good. Not that I entirely disagree with Russell on that front, but I'm trying to see what actual issue NM might have been formulated to resolve. Near as I can tell so far, it has something to do with the mind-body problem. I'm getting the sense that it's primarily an abstract philosophical and intellectual scheme for people with a certain detached cast of mind: I don't mean that derogatorily, only descriptively. One reason I find idealism attractive, I suppose, is that it gives primacy to subjectivity, which is the only thing anyone can be sure of. It's therefore involving in a particularly intimate way. I don't know, but do you find NM involving in a similar way? And what issues does NM address for you that idealism doesn't?

Maybe I should go off and read the entire Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy article, which seems quite long and detailed, but I'm trying for now to get the Dummies Guide version: a few enlightening paragraphs that give the gist of the thing.

Hello Michael. As with Idealism, neutral monism comes in various shades. It is possible to posit an “atomistic” version of it and it is possible to posit a “field based” version of it, just as it is with materialism. In an atomistic or purely accretive version, there would be “atoms” of experientiality, just as materialism supposes essential building blocks of materiality. It is not a version I favor, though I do think that organisms and their minds are accretive.


Neutral monism suffers from la language problem, because most people come to it third after discovering Materialism and Idealism. This leads to the use of the word “neutral,” which is however misleading. We usually say a color is neutral if it has no color relative to some other striking colors. We usually say of a vehicle's gears that the gears are in neutral if they are in fact not in any gear, etc. This language bluffs us into believing that a similar situation must apply to NM. But this would be a mistake. Neither is the “neutral stuff” of neutral monism in any sense a combination or mixture of mind and matter. Again, we are compelled to talk about things in this way because of the structure of our language. I prefer the term “omnijective” (not mine), but even this has its problems, as it supposes that different things are being summed together when in fact this is not so. Rather, mind and matter are incompletely experienced versions of the omnijective.


To create a simplified cheat sheet for ontology, probably the simplest version would be as follows. There are of course numerous other positions possible in the detail, but the main divisions are as follows.


PHYSICALISM (materialism & variants): This is essentially the idea that absolute non-experience can exist, usually in a “substance” referred to as matter. Since experience and non-experience do not commute, the problem for physicalism is to show how experience can exist at all in (or from) a substrate of non-experience. In this there are two common “solutions.” The first is to say that “mind simply is the brain.” However, this cannot really be done without altering the nature of “non-experience” such that it contains at least the seeds of experience within it. In other words, the solution acquires the case of neutral monism despite the protests of its adherents. The second common solution is EMERGENTISM, where it is claimed that experience somehow “arises” in whole cloth out of special systems or configurations of non-experience-stuff. Taken as a metaphysical assertion, this has the same problems as dualism…namely, that at least two large scale ontological assumptions must be made, instead of one. Indeed, it really is a special case of dualism when you scratch its surface in most, and perhaps all, cases.

IDEALISM. Again, this can be framed in various forms. Ultimately it is the idea that pure non-experience cannot exist and that the world we call “physical” can ultimately be absorbed into the category we name experiential or mental. It is not enough to say that it is simply the absence of non-experience, because the experiential may in fact have defining quality that is larger than our subjective experience of the mental, and hence that would be neutral monism. The basic problem for Idealism is to show that non-corporeal mind is in fact anything other than a notion. To do this, it would really have to show that all cases of apparently extra-mental causality are really Idealistic in causation. For instance, someone wakes up in the morning paralysed, having suffered a stroke during the night. Idealism is superior to PHYSICALISM and DUALISM in that it bears only one primary, large scale ontological assumption. However, it does claim something that does not commute with our experience (that what we call the “physical” is ultimately unreal without real causality), and the burden of proof for that claim is with those who make it.


DUALISM is the claim that two essential substances or systems exist, the experiential and the non-experiental broadly taken. The problems here are multiplicity of assumption (as with emergentism), the inability to provide proof in a physically experienced common world of alleged nonphysical worlds, and the problem of explaining how two truly different natures (which are not secretly outgrowths of each other >> conditional monism) could interact with each other.


NEUTRAL MONISM. This is a view that there is one world made of one “substance” or “principle” that is "neutral" in character (language problem). Like Idealism, NM understands that there is no such thing as the purely non-experiential. Nor is such a thing possible. Unlike Idealism, NM understands the *experiential* quality of “physicality” to be ontologically real. The bodiness of your body, for example, is behavior of the real “neutral stuff” being itself, as it actually is. A "nonphysical world" is therefore not possible. Physicality is not an “illusion” or a “bluff” somehow constructed by a separate object called “mind.” “Mind” (or better still “experientiality”) and “physicality,” though it seems to us as if we are talking about two different things, are in fact incompletely glimpsed behaviors of the same neutral existents.
 
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Hello Michael. As with Idealism, neutral monism comes in various shades. It is possible to posit an “atomistic” version of it and it is possible to posit a “field based” version of it, just as it is with materialism. In an atomistic or purely accretive version, there would be “atoms” of experientiality, just as materialism supposes essential building blocks of materiality. It is not a version I favor, though I do think that organisms and their minds are accretive.


Neutral monism suffers from la language problem, because most people come to it third after discovering Materialism and Idealism. This leads to the use of the word “neutral,” which is however misleading. We usually say a color is neutral if it has no color relative to some other striking colors. We usually say of a vehicle's gears that the gears are in neutral if they are in fact not in any gear, etc. This language bluffs us into believing that a similar situation must apply to NM. But this would be a mistake. Neither is the “neutral stuff” of neutral monism in any sense a combination or mixture of mind and matter. Again, we are compelled to talk about things in this way because of the structure of our language. I prefer the term “omnijective” (not mine), but even this has its problems, as it supposes that different things are being summed together when in fact this is not so. Rather, mind and matter are incompletely experienced versions of the omnijective.


To create a simplified cheat sheet for ontology, probably the simplest version would be as follows. There are of course numerous other positions possible in the detail, but the main divisions are as follows.


PHYSICALISM (materialism & variants): This is essentially the idea that absolute non-experience can exist, usually in a “substance” referred to as matter. Since experience and non-experience do not commute, the problem for physicalism is to show how experience can exist at all in (or from) a substrate of non-experience. In this there are two common “solutions.” The first is to say that “mind simply is the brain.” However, this cannot really be done without altering the nature of “non-experience” such that it contains at least the seeds of experience within it. In other words, the solution acquires the case of neutral monism despite the protests of its adherents. The second common solution is EMERGENTISM, where it is claimed that experience somehow “arises” in whole cloth out of special systems or configurations of non-experience-stuff. Taken as a metaphysical assertion, this has the same problems as dualism…namely, that at least two large scale ontological assumptions must be made, instead of one. Indeed, it really is a special case of dualism when you scratch its surface in most, and perhaps all, cases.

IDEALISM. Again, this can be framed in various forms. Ultimately it is the idea that pure non-experience cannot exist and that the world we call “physical” can ultimately be absorbed into the category we name experiential or mental. It is not enough to say that it is simply the absence of non-experience, because the experiential may in fact have defining quality that is larger than our subjective experience of the mental, and hence that would be neutral monism. The basic problem for Idealism is to show that non-corporeal mind is in fact anything other than a notion. To do this, it would really have to show that all cases of apparently extra-mental causality are really Idealistic in causation. For instance, someone wakes up in the morning paralysed, having suffered a stroke during the night. Idealism is superior to PHYSICALISM and DUALISM in that it bears only one primary, large scale ontological assumption. However, it does claim something that does not commute with our experience (that what we call the “physical” is ultimately unreal without real causality), and the burden of proof for that claim is with those who make it.


DUALISM is the claim that two essential substances or systems exist, the experiential and the non-experiental broadly taken. The problems here are redundancy of assumption (as with emergentism), the inability to provide proof in a physically experienced common world of alleged nonphysical worlds, and the problem of explaining how two truly different natures (which are not secretly outgrowths of each other >> conditional monism) could interact with each other.


NEUTRAL MONISM. This is a view that there is one world made of one “substance” or “principle” that is "neutral" in character (language problem). Like Idealism, NM understands that there is no such thing as the purely non-experiential. Nor is such a thing possible. Unlike Idealism, NM understands the *experiential* quality of “physicality” to be ontologically real. The bodiness of your body, for example, is behavior of the real “neutral stuff” being itself, as it actually is. A "nonphysical world" is therefore not possible. Physicality is not an “illusion” or a “bluff” somehow constructed by a separate object called “mind.” “Mind” (or better still “experientiality”) and “physicality,” though it seems to us as if we are talking about two different things, are in fact incompletely glimpsed behaviors of the same neutral existents.


Thank you so much for this very clear "cheat sheet". (are you trained in philosophy, or just a personal interest?)

I have a simple question with regard to physicalism. In addition to being "non-experiential", the physical is usually considered utterly lacking intelligence of any kind. I agree with all the problems you mentioned. But usually, "emergence" is considered a "solution" to things like the emergence of life, sentience, intelligence (and occasionally) feelings and emotions, etc.

It seems to me that the single biggest problem for physicalism is the "emergence" of patterns (usually called laws of nature, but that implies Deism, so I'd prefer not to use it). As far as I understand, physicalists believe that at the instant the Big Bang occurred, there were no orderly "patterns" - they emerged a brief instant after the Bang.

Now, it stretches my mind past almost all credulity to believe in an utterly mindless, dead, non-intelligent chaos, patterns of any kind could emerge and persist for more than a second (or even, a few nanoseconds). This alone is, for me, the utter downfall of physicalism.
But they go farther - they say for billions and billions and billions of years, these patterns persisted, growing more complex over time as well.

This seems to me to utterly defy all logic. Furthermore, in physicalist science (not necessarily all of science - in ontologically neutral science this issue doesn't matter at all), virtually every explanation for any phenomenon has as its implicit background that the ultimate "cause" are one or more of these patterns, (and this is the physicalist part) which not only arose by "chance" but persist in fantastically mind-bending ways in orderly fashion.

(and we haven't yet mentioned another even bigger downfall for physicalism - qualia; if you just go back 14 billion years and try to describe the universe at the time without any reference to qualia; all you have are mathematical abstractions - so this makes it even worse. Suddenly, in this utterly abstract "world", out of pure, mindless, purposeless, dead, unintelligent randomness, patterns emerge - unidentifiable by any of the qualia which make up the experiential world for us - and continue to do so)

So am I completely missing the boat here? If everything in physicalist science depends for its explanation on these patterns - and it is simply impossible to imagine that patterns could "emerge" and persist in a mindless universe, isn't that enough by itself to do away with physicalism? I know I must be missing something, because surely most philosophers have thought of this and dealt with it. I've been asking them for many years and nobody has ever offered what to me is an intelligible response. Then why does anybody take physicalism seriously?
 
NEUTRAL MONISM. This is a view that there is one world made of one “substance” or “principle” that is "neutral" in character (language problem). Like Idealism, NM understands that there is no such thing as the purely non-experiential. Nor is such a thing possible. Unlike Idealism, NM understands the *experiential* quality of “physicality” to be ontologically real. The bodiness of your body, for example, is behavior of the real “neutral stuff” being itself, as it actually is. A "nonphysical world" is therefore not possible. Physicality is not an “illusion” or a “bluff” somehow constructed by a separate object called “mind.” “Mind” (or better still “experientiality”) and “physicality,” though it seems to us as if we are talking about two different things, are in fact incompletely glimpsed behaviors of the same neutral existents.

Thanks for that, Kai. I have a question. You speak of the "bodiness" of the body. Is there then the "experientialism" associated with the body, made of the same stuff, but just behaving differently?

I'd add that I think you're misinterpreting Idealism. No one is saying that "physicality" is a "bluff" or "illusion" constructed by a separate object called "mind". In fact, I'd say Bernardo makes it clear that what we call physicality is indeed real, it's just that it's an image of a process occurring in consciousness that we tend to interpret as concrete. You appear to have a rather dualistic view of idealism that isn't claimed, and so to be addressing a straw man.

I sometimes think in terms of idealism being pluralistic, but not dualistic. The pluralism arises from the capacity of universal consciousness to have many different perspectives from which to experience itself. Since each of these localised consciousness perspectives can't do that, it's very hard to grasp except perhaps now and then in certain states of perception where localised perspective expands and can get a glimpse of universal consciousness.
 
Thanks for that, Kai. I have a question. You speak of the "bodiness" of the body. Is there then the "experientialism" associated with the body, made of the same stuff, but just behaving differently?

It's not behaving differently. It's the same system of neutral existents.

I'd add that I think you're misinterpreting Idealism. No one is saying that "physicality" is a "bluff" or "illusion" constructed by a separate object called "mind". In fact, I'd say Bernardo makes it clear that what we call physicality is indeed real, it's just that it's an image of a process occurring in consciousness that we tend to interpret as concrete. You appear to have a rather dualistic view of idealism that isn't claimed, and so to be addressing a straw man.

If it can be absorbed back into the "purely mental," then corporeality is not ontologically real. One can't have one's cake and eat it here. As I said above, it is then the responsibility of Idealism to show that non-corporeality is a case that ever actually exists for its alleged mental phenomena. Imo, this case is not persuasive at all.

There is no ontological dualism in the remarks I made about the Ideal standpoint.
 
Thank you so much for this very clear "cheat sheet". (are you trained in philosophy, or just a personal interest?)

I have a simple question with regard to physicalism. In addition to being "non-experiential", the physical is usually considered utterly lacking intelligence of any kind. I agree with all the problems you mentioned. But usually, "emergence" is considered a "solution" to things like the emergence of life, sentience, intelligence (and occasionally) feelings and emotions, etc.

It seems to me that the single biggest problem for physicalism is the "emergence" of patterns (usually called laws of nature, but that implies Deism, so I'd prefer not to use it). As far as I understand, physicalists believe that at the instant the Big Bang occurred, there were no orderly "patterns" - they emerged a brief instant after the Bang.

Now, it stretches my mind past almost all credulity to believe in an utterly mindless, dead, non-intelligent chaos, patterns of any kind could emerge and persist for more than a second (or even, a few nanoseconds). This alone is, for me, the utter downfall of physicalism.
But they go farther - they say for billions and billions and billions of years, these patterns persisted, growing more complex over time as well.

This seems to me to utterly defy all logic. Furthermore, in physicalist science (not necessarily all of science - in ontologically neutral science this issue doesn't matter at all), virtually every explanation for any phenomenon has as its implicit background that the ultimate "cause" are one or more of these patterns, (and this is the physicalist part) which not only arose by "chance" but persist in fantastically mind-bending ways in orderly fashion.

(and we haven't yet mentioned another even bigger downfall for physicalism - qualia; if you just go back 14 billion years and try to describe the universe at the time without any reference to qualia; all you have are mathematical abstractions - so this makes it even worse. Suddenly, in this utterly abstract "world", out of pure, mindless, purposeless, dead, unintelligent randomness, patterns emerge - unidentifiable by any of the qualia which make up the experiential world for us - and continue to do so)

So am I completely missing the boat here? If everything in physicalist science depends for its explanation on these patterns - and it is simply impossible to imagine that patterns could "emerge" and persist in a mindless universe, isn't that enough by itself to do away with physicalism? I know I must be missing something, because surely most philosophers have thought of this and dealt with it. I've been asking them for many years and nobody has ever offered what to me is an intelligible response. Then why does anybody take physicalism seriously?

Don, the question of "origins" is a thorny one. The concept of "natural laws" is of course an oxymoron because laws are decrees by a willing agency, and for such willing to be capable of constructing something as specific as 'decrees' one would assume it already information-bearing.

I think part of the problem arises with the assumption of an origin to existence. I have always found the claim for an arbitrary "start of things" unconvincing, as if some pre-existence was waiting around outside of coherent time for its chance to begin...which itself seems a less than coherent concept.

I have taken some formal philosophy courses in the past, but in no sense would I promote myself to actual "philosopher." I am just an interested party strongly nagged by the questions of Being. :)
 
It's not behaving differently. It's the same system of neutral existents.

You introduced the concept of behaviour, not I, when you said: "Mind” (or better still “experientiality”) and “physicality,” though it seems to us as if we are talking about two different things, are in fact incompletely glimpsed behaviors of the same neutral existents."
If it can be absorbed back into the "purely mental," then corporeality is not ontologically real. One can't have one's cake and eat it here. As I said above, it is then the responsibility of Idealism to show that non-corporeality is a case that ever actually exists for its alleged mental phenomena. Imo, this case is not persuasive at all.

If what can be absorbed back into the purely mental? Where did I say that or anything like that? As for showing that non-corporeality actually exists what about showing that corporeality exists in a physical sense?

This is like trying to plait sawdust. I don't think you understand idealism and wonder if you understand NM. No point trying to take this any further.
 
You introduced the concept of behaviour, not I, when you said: "Mind” (or better still “experientiality”) and “physicality,” though it seems to us as if we are talking about two different things, are in fact incompletely glimpsed behaviors of the same neutral existents."

Right. There's only one fundamental set of behaviors in NM.

If what can be absorbed back into the purely mental? Where did I say that or anything like that? As for showing that non-corporeality actually exists what about showing that corporeality exists in a physical sense?

What you said was this:

No one is saying that "physicality" is a "bluff" or "illusion" constructed by a separate object called "mind". In fact, I'd say Bernardo makes it clear that what we call physicality is indeed real, it's just that it's an image of a process occurring in consciousness that we tend to interpret as concrete.

If it is "just an image of a process occurring in consciousness that we tend to interpret as concrete" then it is not ontologically real, and can be absorbed back into (that which Idealism claims as) ontologically real, i.e. the mental world.

This is like trying to plait sawdust. I don't think you understand idealism and wonder if you understand NM. No point trying to take this any further.

Okay Michael, please explain it to me ;)
 
Shoot! Can't find the correct episode... Can anyone point me to the episode where Alex refers to a thought experiment where a person "has a great idea" and writes it down, then dies, and another person reads the idea? Thereby moving a non-physical thing (an idea) from one mind to another???
I get your point... maybe a bad example/metaphor... then again, all of these examples can be broken down one way or another. the point (and I think we agree on this) is that our present view demands that consciousness is an illusion... that it can do no work. I think the placebo effect and Schwartz's neuroplasticity suggest otherwise.
 
I don't deny transcendence. I don't deny that empirical reality is, probably, an infinitesimally thin slice of what is really going on. I don't deny that maybe even the bodies we see are flattened projections of the real psychic structure that constitutes our complete 'whirlpools.' I don't even deny 'God' depending on how the word is defined.

Yet, the challenge I set myself to address is clarifying an ontological framework for making sense of empirical reality without the postulates of materialism/realism. As such, I am purposefully constraining myself to consensus reality and the parts of transcendence for which there is enough critical mass of evidence (like NDEs).

fair enough, but you're wandering into very murky waters. how thin is the slice? who determines "critical mass of evidence?"

better to just falsify materialism and pause there for a minute.
 
Guys, I will come back another day to continue. Many other things going on! (which is a good thing, I guess) I hope I managed to compensate a bit for my silence in the first days of this thread. I was in no way snubbing what was going on here; life was just too crazy. I shall be back! :)

Bernardo, Jim Tucker just published an intesting article, "Thoughts on a Shared Dream Model of Reincarnation (and Life)" which you may find interesting...

What do you think of Tucker's points and positions as presented in this article?
 
The most sophisticated machines that we humans have produced are computers and in computer software lots of weird things are possible.

Hi Robin.

ok, but doesn't this computer analogy show all... sure it's the "most sophisticated machines that we humans have produced" but maybe that just shows where we are relative to this extended consciousness reality. I mean, that's what all the experiences we're talking about keep telling us... i.e. that we have a limited view of the greater reality.
 
Bernardo, Jim Tucker just published an intesting article, "Thoughts on a Shared Dream Model of Reincarnation (and Life)" which you may find interesting...

What do you think of Tucker's points and positions as presented in this article?

I think his points are interesting and not incompatible with my interpretation of Bernardo. I like his thoughts on the afterlife, as they echo my own musings on the subject. It would be cool if he folded the OBE experience into his overall conception, as these experiences could be seen as entering into another dream from within the primary dream. As he mentioned, the OBE presents the same issue as children reporting veridical elements from the "intermission" stage in between lives as some OBE folks report veridical experiences from the secondary dream (or OBE) into this one. But of course the vast majority of OBE experiences read as quite dream-like and lack any veridical elements and that fits quite nicely into Tucker's framework as well.

I think the conceptual stumbling block for any of these similar frameworks is that the different dream realities appear to obey different subsets of what appear to be laws or rules. Then the urge is to pull back the curtain and try and understand what is behind all the various appearances, the appearance of the physical reality, the appearance of the dream reality, the appearance of the OBE reality, the NDE reality, the afterlife reality. Then there must be some vehicle, or at least the appearance of a vehicle that continues throughout these different realities. And how does that vehicle relate to identity as opposed to something more primary like soul or spirit?

It appears that something exists. What a delight to be a part of it.

"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop." -- Rumi
 
Bernardo, Jim Tucker just published an intesting article, "Thoughts on a Shared Dream Model of Reincarnation (and Life)" which you may find interesting...
What do you think of Tucker's points and positions as presented in this article?

Thanks for sharing this Vortex, interesting read.

Only thing I would like to mention is that this is yet another set of ideas (like Bernardo's view on UFOs) that has a lot in common with the Multiverse ideas. Tucker is talking about different shared-dreams that he seems to posit are different space-time worlds/universes.

I just can't help but think that in their materialistic slumber modern day physicists may have stumbled across something that does have some truth, even if the theoretical frameworks for a Multiverse still need a lot of work. I'm not even sure if I am as concerned as I used to be about the epicycle-like math that is found in these theories. If, as Tucker points out, there is no reason to think there can't be a veritably infinite number of other shared-dreams (why should the "mind of God" be mathematically limited to a finite set of "anything") then perhaps it is no accident that physicists are running into this kind of mathematical framework, over and over again.

Sri Aurobindo said that the nature of reality in quantum mechanics is nature trying to tell us that she is not physically reducible ad nausea - or, that nature cannot be continuously divided into more and more fundamental physical building blocks and that one eventually must confront the primary role of consciousness, as we finally seem to doing within quantum mechanics, even if in a rather nascent state. So, perhaps these various multiverse theories are, once again, nature trying to tell us something - that reality is not limited to one story-line, or one shared-dream, or one space-time world/universe.

Speculative, yes, but I keep seeing more and more ideas from parapsychology that jive up with the Multiverse in these ways, that one can't help but wonder and re-evaluate their position on the Multiverse.
 
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fair enough, but you're wandering into very murky waters. how thin is the slice? who determines "critical mass of evidence?"

better to just falsify materialism and pause there for a minute.

Strictly speaking, one cannot falsify philosophical standpoints.
However, one can frame plausibility arguments for or against them based on number of core assumptions,, "torturedness" of inference, etc.

Materialism, in practice, is really dualism. So the plausibility arguments against it are the same as the plausibility arguments against dualism.
 
Sri Aurobindo said that the nature of reality in quantum mechanics is nature trying to tell us that she is not physically reducible ad nausea - or, that nature cannot be continuously divided into more and more fundamental physical building blocks and that one eventually must confront the primary role of consciousness, as we finally seem to doing within quantum mechanics, even if in a rather nascent state. So, perhaps these various multiverse theories are, once again, nature trying to tell us something - that reality is not limited to one story-line, or one shared-dream, or one space-time world/universe.

Speculative, yes, but I keep seeing more and more ideas from parapsychology that jive up with the Multiverse in these ways, that one can't help but wonder and re-evaluate their position on the Multiverse.

EthanT, you might enjoy Mohrhoff's paper Radical Nonlocality if you haven't read it yet. He proposes that at the lowest level of subdivision we see the distinction between these separate points in space disappear, suggesting numerical identity between them and thus a unified firmament that likens to Aurobindo's Supermind.

Mohrhoff's opinion is that this Supermind concept leaves space for the paranormal, but quantum mechanics alone cannot explain such effects. Essentially what I gathered was Mohrhoff believes QM is a description of part of reality, but not the total description of the firmament everything would reduce to.

I thought it bore an interesting comparison to the Ontic Structural Realism Massimo seemed rather taken with:

'One last parting shot, about a topic that the astute reader may have noticed I have bypassed so far: if every thing is gone and we only have mathematical structures and relations, what is the ontological status of mathematical objects themselves? Here are the only relevant quotes from Ladyman and Ross that I could find:

" OSR as we develop it is in principle friendly to a naturalized version of Platonism. ... One distinct, and very interesting, possibility is that as we become truly used to thinking of the stuff of the physical universe as being patterns rather than little things, the traditional gulf between Platonistic realism about mathematics and naturalistic realism about physics will shrink or even vanish. ... [Bertrand Russell] was first and foremost a Platonist. But as we pointed out there are versions of Platonism that are compatible with naturalism; and Russell’s Platonism was motivated by facts about mathematics and its relationship to science, so was PNC [Principle of Naturalistic Closure] -compatible."

Wild stuff, no? Now I don’t feel too badly about having written in sympathetic terms about mathematical Platonism...'
 
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Strictly speaking, one cannot falsify philosophical standpoints.
However, one can frame plausibility arguments for or against them based on number of core assumptions,, "torturedness" of inference, etc.

Materialism, in practice, is really dualism. So the plausibility arguments against it are the same as the plausibility arguments against dualism.
I'm just saying mind not equal brain.
 
EthanT, you might enjoy Mohrhoff's paper Radical Nonlocality if you haven't read it yet. He proposes that at the lowest level of subdivision we see the distinction between these separate points in space disappear, suggesting numerical identity between them and thus a unified firmament that likens to Aurobindo's Supermind.

Mohrhoff's opinion is that this Supermind concept leaves space for the paranormal, but quantum mechanics alone cannot explain such effects. Essentially what I gathered was Mohrhoff believes QM is a description of part of reality, but not the total description of the firmament everything would reduce to.

I thought it bore an interesting comparison to the Ontic Structural Realism Massimo seemed rather taken with:

'One last parting shot, about a topic that the astute reader may have noticed I have bypassed so far: if every thing is gone and we only have mathematical structures and relations, what is the ontological status of mathematical objects themselves? Here are the only relevant quotes from Ladyman and Ross that I could find:

" OSR as we develop it is in principle friendly to a naturalized version of Platonism. ... One distinct, and very interesting, possibility is that as we become truly used to thinking of the stuff of the physical universe as being patterns rather than little things, the traditional gulf between Platonistic realism about mathematics and naturalistic realism about physics will shrink or even vanish. ... [Bertrand Russell] was first and foremost a Platonist. But as we pointed out there are versions of Platonism that are compatible with naturalism; and Russell’s Platonism was motivated by facts about mathematics and its relationship to science, so was PNC [Principle of Naturalistic Closure] -compatible."

Wild stuff, no? Now I don’t feel too badly about having written in sympathetic terms about mathematical Platonism...'

Thanks Sciborg, definitely sounds interesting, I'll give it a read here soon! :)
 
Yes! A philosopher has saved the day... :)
That is the central question, isn't it? And that is what I try to do in 250 pages.



Why is the problem of good-evil different from the problem of black-white, light-dark, up-down, past-present, or any other duality? When a string vibrates, it bulges up and down. When mind vibrates, its state goes through opposite polarities as well...
I'm not sure that the problem of good-evil is different from the problem posed by these other dualities, except in that a great many people seem uncomfortable with the former, and determined to explain all apparent evil as good in disguise. All I wanted to point out is that it's really hard to do that without invoking other dualities that are similarly uncomfortable. If the seeming existence of evil is really just a symptom of ignorance, well, why is there that ignorance? If the entire universe is pure love and goodness, why would it ever allow the existence of something that causes creatures within it to see the world in such a morally ghastly light and to experience something that certainly feels likes evil, even if it isn't "really"?
 
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