Bernardo Kastrup

Here, there is enough confusion that it might be best to look at the fine distinction between physical and non-physical. Kastrup doesn't tend to articulate the most important terms like these.

To get to the bottom of the disagreement, I'll try the method of tracing back his "reason chains" to their source: what first made Bernardo believe his Idealist explanation? What is "the first point of divergence" between his view and mine?

## What is giving Bernardo the idea that the physicalist explanation is wrong?

Essentially: why would we add "internal experience" as a property of everything around us? Why does the cup on my table need to contain qualia?

Well, going by his online writing called "Analytic Idealism: A consciousness-only ontology", it looks like only a few things:

1. he thinks quantum physics (!) is proof of the non-physical
2. the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness
3. """failures and internal contradictions of the very thought processes that underlie mainstream physicalism and related ontologies"""
4. """such mechanisms as cerebral hypoxia, physiological stress, [etc. etc.][...] subjects report self-transcending experiences often described as “mystical” and “awareness-expanding,” as well as self-transcending skills often described as “savant.”""

That's all I have found. Numbers 1 and 4 are plainly confused. Quantum physics is physics. And mechanisms are physics.

That leaves us with the good 'ol ""hard problem of consciousness"", and whatever he thinks he's referring to in that quote in #3.

### **The ""hard problem of consciousness""?**

The "hard problem" is basically: the conclusion that consciousness can't be explained by physics, based on the assumption that knowledge of physical systems won't explain consciousness.

I address it here, in my page about qualia from physical systems.

You could also check out my related pages on "philosophical zombies":

* is the zombie argument sound and valid?
* why do people believe the zombie argument?

He has no solution either, by the way. So this couldn't convince us to accept his position even if it were a so-called ""hard"" problem. As I said to one of his supporters:

> if he denies my explanation, why do things appear the way they do? Why couldn't they look some other way? Again, the same thing: what's with electron spin, charge, and elementary particles? All he can do is give correlation, unless he adopts my explanation. **Saying "that's just what they look like from the outside" doesn't answer why they don't look differently from the "outside".**
>
>

### **#3, Failures and Internal Contradictions? What?**

Here, he points to a bizarre and seemingly confused paper he published (he even accuses his peers, publishing their responses, of interpreting him completely wrongly). The abstract itself begins by attacking dualism...but physicalism is not dualism, so the relevance of the paper is not clear.

It should suffice for me to point to my above sections where I answered what physicalism is and why I believe it is true.

I'll say more if I can ever reconcile his paper with his protestations that people are misinterpreting it.

I'm not going to lie, the whole thing, along with some of his responses to the critics, makes me suspicious that he is either dishonest or very incompetent. He says he didn't mean to mix up the model in our heads about "matter" with the entity proposed to exist by that model, but then to prove he didn't mix them up he quotes a passage where there is no way to interpret him as not having mixed them up. He demonstrates he doesn't understand the word "hypotheses", saying metaphysics is not merely about predictions. After noting ""grey ares", he tries to maintain the distinction between science and philosophy not in terms of degree of certainty and data, but by saying metaphysics must be evaluated "also in terms of parsimony, internal logical consistency and epistemic cost (the latter being the subject of the target article)." As if science isn't also evaluated in those terms, and as if "parsimony" and "epistemic cost" are not also about the probability of predictions being true.

## How does Bernardo account for physics?

Can someone who is arguing against physicalism really spend so little time on the success of physics? What sleight of hand is he pulling?

See my page "Is Physicalism True?" which outlines what physicalism is and why I think it's true.

### **His response to what he calls "The Natural Order Objection"**

Let's take a look at what he has to say in (the four-paragraphs-long) 4.8, The Natural Order Objection:

* maybe "phenomenality in universal consciousness unfolds according to very stable and orderly patterns and regularities, whose extrinsic appearance corresponds to the laws of nature"

Ok, maybe. Or maybe not.

A physicalist world has to be that way. Reductionist, unbreakable patterns, all that. But an Idealist world does not have to be that way, it could be like a dream, or a cartoon instead. There's an infinite number of ways that an Idealist world could violate the predictions of physicalism. Why doesn't it ever? What are the odds of that?

Surely trillions to one.

He goes on, with more maybes:

* maybe chaotic minds only happen because of evolution, so minds that didn't evolve wouldn't be chaotic maybe
* some noobs (like ... Jung ...) say there are psychological archetypes, so maybe that's what physics is

None of this helps the odds significantly. We already know "maybe" this "maybe" that. But what makes those things likely?

Physicalism predicts we'd have physics 100%. Can Kastrup honestly claim that any of his excuses here have even more than 50-50 odds of being true, rather than false?

Even if we can trust ... Jung ... it wouldn't raise the odds to something that favors his theory. "Archetypes" are "orderly", sure, but they are not necessarily reductionist. Again we can go back to dreams and cartoons. Nothing about "archetypes" predicts something like physics rather than like a dream or a cartoon. And Jung is all about them dreams.

## See also:

* Is Physicalism Bad?

* Is Physicalism True?

* Reality