Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, Debating the Nature of Reality |574|

Robbedigital said:
Bernardo makes me comfortable with the possibility that we all live in fully separate individual worlds inside a shared system.
I used to (for most of my adult life and still often do) ask myself in regard to religion, "What if they're all right?".
It's much easier for me to make sense of that, than to understand how someone as brilliantly deep-thinking as Bernardo could be completely blind in regard to the Climate & Ukraine things being tied to a leadership who's ultimate goal is for the masses of humanity to assume the role of automatons or cattle. Conversely or otherwise, I'm stuck with the thought that maybe I shouldn't be pedestalizing anyone at all and even have compassion that really smart people are often just really learned people on journeys like everyone else.

And then the God thing. .. Bernardo tried to do this whole dance of "hey, guess what guys, I call God God now, lol, isn't that neat!?" Um, No, B. Actually you kinda skipped right past the fact that this change in perspective has a pretty significant ties to your methodological conclusion of there being a base indivisible unit of reality and that all being definitively a construct of consciousness..... So what's "God"'s part in that, Bernardo? If you haven't thought into this then you have some work to do.
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I see you mention Ukraine? Do you have any idea about what’s going on there? I have a colleague whose husbond died fighting as a soldier on the ukrainian side in the war. That thing is real and shame on those spreading disinformation about the facts of this war.
 
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Robbedigital said:
No, B. Actually you kinda skipped right past the fact that this change in perspective has a pretty significant ties to your methodological conclusion of there being a base indivisible unit of reality and that all being definitively a construct of consciousness..... So what's "God"'s part in that, Bernardo? If you haven't thought into this then you have some work to do.
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Nice! I've had similar thoughts but you articulated it better :)

I also think this relates to your point above regarding the whole person... I mean knowing what we now know about Bernardo and global warming and Ukraine shines a different light on the God thing.
 
Robbedigital said:
And then the God thing. .. Bernardo tried to do this whole dance of "hey, guess what guys, I call God God now, lol, isn't that neat!?" Um, No, B. Actually you kinda skipped right past the fact that this change in perspective has a pretty significant ties to your methodological conclusion of there being a base indivisible unit of reality and that all being definitively a construct of consciousness..... So what's "God"'s part in that, Bernardo? If you haven't thought into this then you have some work to do.
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I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. But the way I interpret Bernardo's now being comfortable with the word "God" is that he's happy to use it as a referrent to the unitary consciousness that underlines everything.

I don't think he's implying that there's this unitary consciousness and then there's "God" as if it's something different and distinct from it (if that's what you mean). Remember, he doesn't think unitary consciousness is metaconscious, and so he probably doesn't think "God", as a synonym for that, is metaconscious.

I don't think Bernardo's "God" is at all like the Abrahamic concept of an all-powerful entity with a much bigger version of human metaconsciousness. It's more an instinctive and intuitive thing that is just being and doing what it has to be and do, with possibly some fuzzy aim to "evolve itself" (I'm using human language here of course), which is where all the conscious dissociated elements of itself may come in.

In them, the trend has been from the instinctive/intuitive to the more and more metaconscious, i.e. to increasing awareness of awareness. And maybe that helps "God" in some way to advance its aim through surrogation, so to speak.
 
Michael Larkin said:
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. But the way I interpret Bernardo's now being comfortable with the word "God" is that he's happy to use it as a referrent to the unitary consciousness that underlines everything.
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aka An attempt to conceptualization God with out anthropomorphizing. I say it's admirable for anyone to take this journey.

Michael Larkin said:
I don't think he's implying that there's this unitary consciousness and then there's "God" as if it's something different and distinct from it (if that's what you mean). Remember, he doesn't think unitary consciousness is metaconscious, and so he probably doesn't think "God", as a synonym for that, is metaconscious.
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"Could be either or both." Give him a few years to state this.

Michael Larkin said:
I don't think Bernardo's "God" is at all like the Abrahamic concept of an all-powerful entity with a much bigger version of human metaconsciousness. It's more an instinctive and intuitive thing that is just being and doing what it has to be and do, with possibly some fuzzy aim to "evolve itself" (I'm using human language here of course), which is where all the conscious dissociated elements of itself may come in.
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One day anywhere between today and 10 years from now, when Bernardo reports on an experience of the feeling of an intimate seemingly person-to-person (or spirit to spirit) communication with "God", he will slip up and anthropomorphize it using the exact same language which the meta-consciousness language dances-around/avoids. This does not mean "his god" has changed from a unitary consciousness into a person. Rather I'd argue that he just experienced a different perception of God.

Michael Larkin said:
In them, the trend has been from the instinctive/intuitive to the more and more metaconscious, i.e. to increasing awareness of awareness. And maybe that helps "God" in some way to advance its aim through surrogation, so to speak.
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I'm not quite sure what you're saying here
 
Robbedigital said:
(I said):
In them, the trend has been from the instinctive/intuitive to the more and more metaconscious, i.e. to increasing awareness of awareness. And maybe that helps "God" in some way to advance its aim through surrogation, so to speak.
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I'm not quite sure what you're saying here
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The more basic living entities rely on instincts. They don't really have free will. In this, they mirror MAL, which BK claims could be instinctive/intuitive without metacognition (or awareness of awareness). As evolution progesses, living forms progessively develop metacognition. Clearly some molluscs, birds and apes have varying degrees of metacognition, though not as much as humans.

MAL is the underlying source of everything, but since it's not metacognitive, doesn't have free will in and of itself if I understand BK rightly. But it can experience free will through some dissociated living entities. The course of evolution seems to be towards increasing metacognition, and behind that may be MAL's instinctive/intuitive push in that direction. In some way, it may be something it is "exploring" so to speak through some of its surrogates -- the dissociated entities we think of as living beings.
 
David Bailey said:
I'm not so sure, even cells can appear awfully intelligent:
http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/g-buehler/FRAME.HTM

Beneath cells we have viruses, and that is another story :)

David
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IMHO, "intelligence" might not require metaconsciousness on the part of MAL. It's a word that we humans apply to an ability to reason logically, probably reaching its zenith in mathematics. When we look at cellular activity, we may project intelligence onto cells because their components and the interactions of those seem so incredibly complex. But I wonder whether this intrinsic complexity isn't just part of the natural activity of MAL. I don't think cells think out what they do. Otherwise, cells would seem to have to be more intelligent than the organisms (including us) that contain them.

From another perspective, cells may not be intelligent; underlying their activity might be the instinctive/intuitional nature of MAL, which is probably intrinsically orders of magnitude more complex than cells. MAL may not need to be "intelligent". It may be just what it happens to be, and if that weren't so, there couldn't be what appear to us as cells, tissues, organs or organisms. We attribute intelligence to MAL because intelligence is all we have when we try to understand and manipulate what appears to us as various aspects of the world. So we project our own concept of intelligence (magnified enormously) onto the ordered complexity we see all around us.

So, as I suggested, "intelligence" may be something we project onto hierarchically arranged complex systems that seem to possess a degree of autonomy -- what we call multicellular living organisms. To consider complexity requires a lot of thought by the human mind, but does MAL need to think things out? Or does it just have to have "intentions" that automatically manifest themselves by dint of its very nature?

We look at the world and marvel; we couldn't create (the appearance of) a cell, so whatever did must be much more intelligent than us. Maybe, because we don't possess MAL's ability to manifest through intention alone -- in fact can only make something manifest through metaconscious effort -- we think it must be the same for MAL. But it may not be. Maybe this attribution of immense intelligence to MAL helps creates in human minds the Abrahamic concept of God. A God which doesn't only possess our intelligence (raised to the nth degree), but also many of our other virtues (and vices) raised to a similar degree.
 
Michael Larkin said:
IMHO, "intelligence" might not require metaconsciousness on the part of MAL. It's a word that we humans apply to an ability to reason logically, probably reaching its zenith in mathematics. When we look at cellular activity, we may project intelligence onto cells because their components and the interactions of those seem so incredibly complex. But I wonder whether this intrinsic complexity isn't just part of the natural activity of MAL. I don't think cells think out what they do. Otherwise, cells would seem to have to be more intelligent than the organisms (including us) that contain them.

From another perspective, cells may not be intelligent; underlying their activity might be the instinctive/intuitional nature of MAL, which is probably intrinsically orders of magnitude more complex than cells. MAL may not need to be "intelligent". It may be just what it happens to be, and if that weren't so, there couldn't be what appear to us as cells, tissues, organs or organisms. We attribute intelligence to MAL because intelligence is all we have when we try to understand and manipulate what appears to us as various aspects of the world. So we project our own concept of intelligence (magnified enormously) onto the ordered complexity we see all around us.

So, as I suggested, "intelligence" may be something we project onto hierarchically arranged complex systems that seem to possess a degree of autonomy -- what we call multicellular living organisms. To consider complexity requires a lot of thought by the human mind, but does MAL need to think things out? Or does it just have to have "intentions" that automatically manifest themselves by dint of its very nature?

We look at the world and marvel; we couldn't create (the appearance of) a cell, so whatever did must be much more intelligent than us. Maybe, because we don't possess MAL's ability to manifest through intention alone -- in fact can only make something manifest through metaconscious effort -- we think it must be the same for MAL. But it may not be. Maybe this attribution of immense intelligence to MAL helps creates in human minds the Abrahamic concept of God. A God which doesn't only possess our intelligence (raised to the nth degree), but also many of our other virtues (and vices) raised to a similar degree.
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People talk about intelligence, consciousness, metaconsciousness , instinct, etc in a way that I'm not totally comfortable with. I know you are very keen on BK's ideas, and I'm quite a lot less because I feel there may be layers and layers of psychic complexities between us and the bottom layer of reality.

Those cells look conscious as one cell chases another.While I'm sure it would be possible to create such a scene inside a computer, but this was real life!

I am inclined to believe something conscious is going on there. Remember, Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields are explicitly supposed to be conscious (I think he would agree to that description) - that gives them the ability to notice that a newt embryo had lost an eye, and figure out a one-off way to replace it (remember the experiment?)

David
 
Michael Larkin said:
The more basic living entities rely on instincts. They don't really have free will. In this, they mirror MAL, which BK claims could be instinctive/intuitive without metacognition (or awareness of awareness). As evolution progesses, living forms progessively develop metacognition. Clearly some molluscs, birds and apes have varying degrees of metacognition, though not as much as humans.

MAL is the underlying source of everything, but since it's not metacognitive, doesn't have free will in and of itself if I understand BK rightly. But it can experience free will through some dissociated living entities. The course of evolution seems to be towards increasing metacognition, and behind that may be MAL's instinctive/intuitive push in that direction. In some way, it may be something it is "exploring" so to speak through some of its surrogates -- the dissociated entities we think of as living beings.
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Sounds like BK. And that's the kind of stuff that will set him up for a lot of future mental gymnastics as he continues his prayer journey. And I'm only saying that from a position of experience, not authority.

Three of the most elevated prayer teachings I've heard in my entire life were all in the last few months.
1. A few months ago my older brother responding when I had rhetorically asked "What are we supposed to do about the powerful oligarch psychopaths?", responded "Pray for them.".
2. A month or so ago, Owen Benjamin (banned racially explicit comedian) described an ideal prayer would not ask God to remove all obstacles, but rather that God bless one with the strength to journey whatever path is laid before them.
3. A few days ago, same comedian Owen Benjamin described what he considers a higher level to strive toward in regard to viewing powerful oligarch psychopaths or just bad people. He suggested looking on them with compassion and pity for the dark things they are doing, and also suggested praying for them. But he really emphasized that the compassion is higher level and difficult to do whatsoever.

“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”

I think this fishing proverb can be used to speculate on God safely - without just totally defaulting to anthropomorphism.

Everything in the universe I'm aware of which produces offspring does so in a manner of aiming it's offspring toward independence (excluding dysfunctional anomalies or exceptions to the rule, of course).
So without anthropomorphizing too much, I think it's safe to speculate that an intelligent MAL would intend the same for the evolution of consciousness, as opposed to just some fantasy experience it plays for itself when it gets bored.
 
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Robbedigital said:
So without anthropomorphizing too much, I think it's safe to speculate that an intelligent MAL would intend the same for the evolution of consciousness, as opposed to just some fantasy experience it plays for itself when it gets bored.
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You may be right, of course.

OTOH, you're using language and projecting verbal descriptions onto MAL. There's an underlying assumption that language reflects reality rather than being a means for us to organise and share our concepts of the world. The very fact of using language implies anthropomorphism is taking place.

I'm not really suggesting that MAL is engaging in some kind of fantasy; indeed, to do that, I'd have to project on to it the faculty of being able to fantasise. And if it can fantasise, why can't it be intelligent, happy, sad, pleased, angry, interested or bored...? Every descriptor we use is ultimately based on our own experience of the world.

I put "intention" in quotes in my earlier post because without the the quotes it's just another descriptor, implying that MAL can have intentions in the same way that we do. But it may not be so. I only used the word, albeit in quotes, because I'm trying to communicate something, and it's the closest in meaning to what I wanted to say. It's quite possible that MAL has "desires", "aims","intentions" and so on in manner of speaking. But I'm positing that as a result of these, unlike us, it is able to influence its own being in such a way that they become manifest.

If something doesn't work out as "intended", does that necessarily mean that MAL has been "observing", as we do, has "detected" a "problem" and used its "intelligence" to "fix" it? Maybe not. Maybe it has an intimate relationship with the "stuff" of its own being, is implicity "aware" what's happening, and is able to adjust how that "stuff" behaves to better suit its "aims".

Some might call that "magic" in a derogatory sense. But magic is only derided because we as humans can't do it. We can't make something happen merely by willing it to be so. We always have to apply some kind of logic and maybe physical effort, even when we claim to be using magic.

This notion of MAL implies that it's not omniscient. It can maybe make, and correct, what it "detects" to be outcomes other than it "intended". This process of "correcting" outcomes (steering them in accordance with "aims") may result in what we think of as "evolution". Things seem to become ever more complex, ever more intricately interrelated, and may appear to us as the result of "intelligence". But the "aim" of evolution may not be metaconscious, but an intrinsic propensity of MAL, it's "instinct" if you like.

I've used lots of "mays" and "mights", and freely admit I don't know if it's anything like this. All I can reasonably assert is that MAL isn't just a being like us, with vastly greater faculties that are essentially of the same nature as ours. The key difference would be that our will has to be mediated by metaconscious effort, whereas with MAL, its "will" has unmediated effects on that which currently is.
 
Michael Larkin said:
All I can reasonably assert is that MAL isn't just a being like us, with vastly greater faculties that are essentially of the same nature as ours. The key difference would be that our will has to be mediated by metaconscious effort, whereas with MAL, its "will" has unmediated effects on that which currently is.
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Beautiful post, entirely. And you wrapped it up right back where I was hoping to add on.

Before I do I'll posit my own premise to be that MAL/God(not equating; rather categorizing) is easiest to write song/story/poem about when personified. And usually any decent MAL/God song/story/poem is prized by how well it can re-depersonify it (MAL/God) after personifying it.

I like to imagine that our existence is a computer program, and that the Big Bang was just the flip of the "ON" switch. And what you refer to as "MAL" is the Computer Hardware+Program, wherewith I perceive "God" to be the one who built the computer, built the program, and hit the "ON" switch. Then, after hitting the switch I find it most likely that God doesn't intervene per se, but rather, the whole experience is geared toward growth/education of those who reach for "God", and that the "spiritual" growth/education is implemented/accommodated by means of MAL.

And I have no difficulty conceptualizing a being capable of omnipotence/omnipresence/omniscience even in a scenario where it's only activity was having hit the "On" switch.

On this template, it makes no sense for a man to pray "God can you give me all my hair back, I can't go on being bald anymore", while innumerable others live out experiences without limbs, blind, deaf, etc.. Because the man would be requesting that The Program itself be changed... And, ironically the larger "Gift/Blessing" is one that leads the man to a life so fulfilled and full of joyful activity that he's completely forgotten any hint of a desire of re-growing hair.

When you're on a long walk and finishing working through some deep thought and an idea pops into your mind which solves or answers the overall question your were thinking about and then suddenly a butterfly flutters in front of your path and you stop and say "ahh" and almost laugh a little. In this situation I don't posit "God sent that butterfly". Instead I posit something like "that butterfly reminds one about God". And maybe MAL has tendency to place butterflies near the end of long trains of certain deep thought.
 
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Robbedigital said:
Beautiful post, entirely. And you wrapped it up right back where I was hoping to add on.

Before I do I'll posit my own premise to be that MAL/God(not equating; rather categorizing) is easiest to write song/story/poem about when personified. And usually any decent MAL/God song/story/poem is prized by how well it can re-depersonify it (MAL/God) after personifying it.

I like to imagine that our existence is a computer program, and that the Big Bang was just the flip of the "ON" switch. And what you refer to as "MAL" is the Computer Hardware+Program, wherewith I perceive "God" to be the one who built the computer, built the program, and hit the "ON" switch. Then, after hitting the switch I find it most likely that God doesn't intervene per se, but rather, the whole experience is geared toward growth/education of those who reach for "God", and that the "spiritual" growth/education is implemented/accommodated by means of MAL.

And I have no difficulty conceptualizing a being capable of omnipotence/omnipresence/omniscience even in a scenario where it's only activity was having hit the "On" switch.

On this template, it makes no sense for a man to pray "God can you give me all my hair back, I can't go on being bald anymore", while innumerable others live out experiences without limbs, blind, deaf, etc.. Because the man would be requesting that The Program itself be changed... And, ironically the larger "Gift/Blessing" is one that leads the man to a life so fulfilled and full of joyful activity that he's completely forgotten any hint of a desire of re-growing hair.

When you're on a long walk and finishing working through some deep thought and an idea pops into your mind which solves or answers the overall question your were thinking about and then suddenly a butterfly flutters in front of your path and you stop and say "ahh" and almost laugh a little. In this situation I don't posit "God sent that butterfly". Instead I posit something like "that butterfly reminds one about God". And maybe MAL has tendency to place butterflies near the end of long trains of certain deep thought.
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Maybe. Your guess is as good as mine. To some extent, it depends how literally one takes your imagined computer metaphor to be. The more literalness, the more duality creeps in. And for me, the name of the game is monism. But to be fair, even BK's idea about dissociation kind of introduces a little duality too. It's as if God/Mal is finding a way to introduce a degree of separation from itself, whilst still being able to have some awareness of what it's separated from.

At the end of the day, we can only be to ourselves what we seem to be, and God/Mal is whatever it is. Due to our limitations, somewhere along the line we have to account for the apparent discontinuity, be it by the human concept of dissociation, or the human concept of something like a computer designer/programmer. We can never escape a degree of anthropomorphism.
 
Thanks, for being aware of some of the disinformation we are having our brains plucked out with.

So disappointing to hear some of your great mind interviewees hoodwinked by globalist propaganda -- Ukraine, covid https://www.asifthinkingmatters.com/blog/category/covid-19,
climate, evolution https://www.asifthinkingmatters.com/solving-the-big-questions-third-edition/category/origins,
and the big bang spinning ball, infinite universe cosmology. https://www.asifthinkingmatters.com/blog/category/lies-as-big-as-the-universe

Your intelligent and informed counters are refreshing.

Another thing that came to mind as Kastrup spoke of being enamored with transhumanism and how it will supposedly tame everyone and move us into a utopia.

Ignored is the fact that we decide to come to Earth for its challenges in order to learn and grow as spirit beings. Free will is essential to that. So is some misery, and, evidently, some willful stupidity. https://www.asifthinkingmatters.com...tions-third-edition/45-why-there-is-suffering

We should believe in the ability of geneticists to transform us, without killing and maiming us, when they are able to create healthy life from scratch and evolve it in the lab. Not gonna happen. https://www.asifthinkingmatters.com/solving-the-big-questions-third-edition/category/origins

The heady enthrallment with what science and medicine can do is so naive.
 
iconoclast said:
Where it was discussed.
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are you possibly confusing BK with the Radin clip?

[01:18:07] Bernardo Kastrup: If I separate it from Dean for the moment, and I, and I just speak generically, I do find it troubling the attempt to influence what is essentially human personality, human mental life through a Physiological delivery mechanism

-- please use links and quotations to explain/support yr points.
 
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