# Science Ideated  ## Metadata - Author: [[Bernardo Kastrup]] - Full Title: Science Ideated - Category: #books ## Highlights - When a neurosurgeon manipulates one’s brain leading to a corresponding modulation of inner experience, or when a drug does the same thing after being ingested, what is happening is that a transpersonal mental process—whose extrinsic appearance is the surgeon’s probe or the ingested pill—modulates a personal mental process; namely, the subject’s inner experience. This is no more surprising than a thought modulating an emotion, or vice versa. To an idealist, there isonly mind, matter being just what certain mental processes look like from a given vantage point. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=700)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The only way to break out of this cycle is to realize that mind excels at deceiving itself. As the history of science and philosophy attests to, this is what mind does best. And the very idea that we can be objective investigators impartially assessing the world around us is mind’s greatest self-deception. Our mental pictures of the world are inherently unreliable. The day we have the courage to bite this bullet at a cultural level, is the day we will begin to make real progress. ([Location 894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=894)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Illusionists and eliminativists play a slippery and deceptive game of words that philosopher Galen Strawson once called ‘looking-glassing’ (2013): they implicitly and conveniently change the meaning they attribute to the word ‘consciousness’ depending on circumstances. ([Location 1068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=1068)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Good alternatives to materialism are those that replace elementary particles with experiential states in their reduction base, as opposed to simply adding elements to it. We call this class of alternatives ‘idealism.’ And then the best formulations of idealism are those that have one single element in their reduction base: universal consciousness itself, a spatially unbound field of subjectivity whose particular patterns of excitation give rise to the myriad qualities of empirical experience. Under such a theory, a unified quantum field is universal consciousness. ([Location 1404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=1404)) - Tags: [[pink]] - I think we, along with all other living beings, are merely dissociated mental complexes—‘alters’—of this fundamentally unitary universal mind. ([Location 1508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=1508)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Indeed, in my view ‘matter’—all matter—is merely the name we give to what conscious inner life looks like from across its dissociative boundary. That’s why there are such tight correlations between inner experience and measurable patterns of brain activity. ([Location 1514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=1514)) - Tags: [[pink]] - To me what we call ‘matter’ is merely the extrinsic appearance of inner phenomenality, as observed from across a dissociative boundary. There’s nothing more to it. To say the same thing in a different way, ‘matter’ is the handy label we give to the contents of a particular modality of experience: perception. ([Location 1536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=1536)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The notion that existence, at its most fundamental level, is sentient and unitary has tremendous implications for how we regard each other, the planet where we live and the universe at large. ([Location 1595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=1595)) - Tags: [[pink]] - laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche. The claim is thus that the dynamics of all inanimate matter in the universe correspond to trans personal mentation, just as an individual’s brain activity—which is also made of matter—corresponds to personal mentation. This notion eliminates arbitrary discontinuities and provides the missing inner essence of the physical world: all matter—not only that in living brains—is the outer appearance of inner experience, different configurations of matter reflecting different patterns or modes of mental activity. ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=1829)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Our intuitive understanding of the concept of information—as cogently captured by Claude Shannon (1948)—is that it is merely a measure of the number of possible states an independently existing system can assume. As such, information is a property of an underlying substrate—associated with the substrate’s possible configurations—not an entity unto itself. ([Location 2307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=2307)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The idea behind it is that, given the equations that govern the behavior of the subatomic particles, we should be able to predict all natural phenomena, including the largest and most complex. If so, understanding the physical laws that operate at the microscopic level—the level of the subatomic particles—is sufficient to provide us with a ‘Theory of Everything.’ In practice, however, it is impossible to predict the behavior of all but the simplest and most minuscule natural phenomena based on this theory. In the words of Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin and David Pines, the associated equations cannot be solved accurately when the number of particles exceeds about 10. No computer existing, or that will ever exist, can break this barrier because it is a catastrophe of dimension. … Predicting protein functionality or the behavior of the human brain from these equations is patently absurd. (2000, emphasis added) Laughlin and Pine’s point is that, each time we add a particle to the system we are trying to model, its complexity grows exponentially. And exponential growth—such as in Ponzi schemes and nuclear chain reactions, to mention two radically different examples—becomes unmanageable very quickly. It is thus effectively impossible to use the Theory of Everything to model relevant, real-life systems. In Laughlin and Pine’s words, ([Location 2470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=2470)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The key issue here is one that permeates the entire metaphysics of materialism: all we ever truly have are the contents of consciousness, which philosophers call ‘phenomenality.’ Our entire life is a stream of felt and perceived phenomenality. That this phenomenality somehow arises from something material, outside consciousness—such as networks of firing neurons—is a theoretical inference, not a lived reality; it’s a narrative we create and buy into on the basis of conceptual reasoning, not something felt. That’s why, for the life of us, we can’t truly identify with it. ([Location 2776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=2776)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The philosophy ship carrying us through life has lost its trained officers and is now at the mercy of winds and currents. The alarming growth in cases of anxiety, depression, ennui and despair we are witnessing is—I am convinced—largely a symptom of the unsustainable lack of firm metaphysical foundations in our culture. After all, it is not easy to find oneself in the strange position of being alive, constantly fighting against entropy, knowing that one day one is guaranteed to lose the fight. If we philosophers don’t help people make sense of, and peace with, this condition, the pharma industry will continue to fill the void. ([Location 2869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=2869)) - Tags: [[pink]] - That’s why true logic is “a magical lure drawing us into oneness” (Ibid.: 144)—i.e. back to reality. ([Location 3083](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=3083)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Logic is no longer regarded as a magical incantation meant to persuade us out of illusion, but has turned into a tool for perpetuating the illusion: “All our attempts to discriminate between reality and deception or between truth and illusion are exactly what keeps on tricking us” (Ibid.: 211). ([Location 3095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=3095)) - Tags: [[pink]] - This is reinforced by the fact that Kingsley overtly associates himself with the thought of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, particularly Jung’s book Answer to Job. And in that book, we find Jung saying: what does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, he possesses … a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself. (2002b: 14–15) ([Location 3107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=3107)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Western culture is thus meant to serve the divine by contributing to it the meta-cognitive insight of self-realization: through us and our Western science—“a gift offered by the gods with a sacred purpose” (Kingsley 2018: 229)—the divine recognizes itself. ([Location 3117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=3117)) - Tags: [[pink]] - What would be truly persuasive for the Western mind? What kind of story could short-circuit our internal narratives, expose their inner contradictions and force us to review our unexamined assumptions? The answer seems absolutely crystal clear to me: reasoning consistently pursued to its ultimate implications. ([Location 3153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=3153)) - Tags: [[pink]] - That we think of life as a series of substantial happenings hanging from a historical timeline is a fantastic cognitive hallucination. Roger Ebert’s last words, illuminated by the clarity that only fast-approaching death can bring, seem to describe it most appropriately: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” And who do you think is the hoaxer? (Kastrup 2016a: 102–104) ([Location 3277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=3277)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Some of them—Rationalist Spirituality (2011a), Why Materialism Is Baloney (2014), Brief Peeks Beyond (2015) and The Idea of the World (2019)—comply fully with the premises and constraints of rational thought, strict reasoning, aiming to convince you that idealism is the most reasonable interpretation of reality. Others—Dreamed up Reality (2011b), Meaning in Absurdity (2012) and More Than Allegory (2016a)—are instances of true logic: they seek to use reasoning to transcend reasoning, to help you glimpse certain mental landscapes or insights that cannot be captured in explicit and unambiguous words. ([Location 3292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0985Z384W&location=3292)) - Tags: [[pink]]