Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 36: An Interview with Bernardo Kastrup: UFOs, Ultraterrestrials, and Meaning In Absurdity

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

In today’s episode, I had the absolute honor of speaking with one of my personal intellectual heroes, Bernardo Kastrup. Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of the Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (with a focus in ontology and philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (with a focus in reconfigurable computing and artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also had a 25-year career in high-technology, having co-founded parallel processing company Silicon Hive (which was acquired by Intel in 2011). Bernardo Kastrup is also the author of 11 books. I basically have an entire Kastrup shelf inmy office. His book, “Meaning In Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality” is, in my opinion, one of the most important books written on the UFO phenomenon. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Just a heads up before we begin—if you aren’t familiar with Kastrup’s thinking on analytic idealism, the first part of this interview might be a little challenging. If you stick it out, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how elegantly analytic idealism deals with some of the more mysterious aspects of the anomalous phenomena. If you’d like to learn more about analytic idealism, there are some great resources and videos that can walk you through it step-by-step. [Links in episode brief.]NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowEPISODE BRIEF[Links to videos on Analytic Idealism in Episode Brief]BECOME A PATRONPatrons get lots of great perks like early and ad-free episodes, access to the private The UFO Rabbit Hole Discord server, and twice-monthly Patron Zoom calls with Kelly Chase.Memberships start at just $5/month.GET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookTIMESTAMP00:00:30 Introduction00:04:35 How working with artificial neural networks at CERN led Bernardo to break with physicalism00:07:12 The difference between intelligence and consciousness00:08:36 Analytic idealism00:12:26 How does analytic idealism relate to the ideas of Donald Hoffman?00:14:38 If the world is mental, why doesn’t it behave like a dream?00:17:23 Bernardo’s UFO experience00:19:37 How UFOs repel our attention00:23:02 Memory and UFOs00:25:46 UFOs and analytic idealism00:30:09 Logic and finding meaning in absurdity00:35:11 The “call of the absurd” and the control mechanism00:39:27 How marketing and propaganda hijack the control mechanism00:42:47 Are “nuts and bolts” UAPs and high strangeness UFO encounters the same phenomenon?00:48:44 Bernardo’s ultraterrestrial hypothesis00:58:37 The rise of AI, NHIs, and the coming consciousness shiftBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You've heard ghost stories, but not like these. These are the ones we were told to never share. Now I'm breaking the silence. Welcome to Lodgetails coming to you from Spectrevision Radio. I'm your host, Rod Williamson. I grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation, where the past doesn't stay buried, where little people and shadow people walk, where UFOs hover over the sacred lands,

where Bigfoot isn't the only thing stalking Indian country, where our ancestors still speak. Here we bring you never before shared accounts of reservation, hauntings, tribal cryptids, UFO encounters, and spirit warnings our ancestors left behind. These come from all tribes across North America and beyond. They aren't just campfire tales. These are living histories. Subscribe to Lodgetails where Sacred meets the supernatural. podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. I have an incredible guest for you guys today. But before we

dive into that, I just wanted to take a quick minute to thank everyone who reached out to me after the last episode in which I shared my own anomalous experience. I received literally hundreds and hundreds of messages from people offering their support and encouragement, many from people who had had their own similar stories to share. I had been more than a little apprehensive about putting my own story out there. And so to have such an outpouring of positivity and love from this community was so humbling and so deeply appreciated. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. There were more messages than I could ever hope to respond to, but please know that I have read every single one and that they mean the absolute world to me. And if you're someone

who's just sharing their story for the first time, or even maybe just starting to recognize that you had an anomalous experience of your own, please know that you aren't alone. There is a giant, big-hearted community that you can plug into if you're looking for connection and support. As always, I recommend that people check out the experiencer group, which is an incredible community that I'm proud to be a part of. They hold regular, anonymous support calls, as well as hosting lots of great online community events. There's also a lot of deep conversations on these topics happening in the UFO rabbit hole patron community on our twice-monthly Zoom calls

and in our private Discord. I'll link to both of those in the episode description. The next episode in that series will be out in a couple of weeks. As I hinted at in the last episode, my experience is just the very tip of the iceberg of a much larger story that has unfolded in the years since. It's truly the strangest and most unbelievable thing

that's ever happened to me. I can't wait to share that with you. Okay, moving on. In today's episode, I had the absolute honor of speaking with one of my personal intellectual heroes, Bernardo Castro. Bernardo Castro is the executive director of the Ascentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, which is the notion that reality is essentially mental.

He has a PhD in philosophy, with a focus in ontology and philosophy of mind, and another PhD in computer engineering with a focus in reconfigurable computing and artificial intelligence. As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN and the Phillips Research Laboratories, where the Casimir effect of quantum field theory was discovered. He has also had a 25-year career in high technology, including having co-founded the parallel processing company Silicon High. which was acquired by Intel in 2011. Bernardo Castrip is also the author of 11 books. I basically have an entire castrip shelf in my office.

His book, Meaning and Absurdity, what bizarre phenomena can tell us about the nature of reality, is, in my opinion, one of the most important books written on the UFO phenomenon. I can't recommend it highly enough. And just a heads up before we begin, if you aren't familiar with Castrips thinking on analytic idealism, The first part of this interview might be a little bit challenging.

But if you stick it out, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how elegantly analytic idealism deals with some of the more mysterious aspects of anomalous phenomena. If you'd like to learn more about analytic idealism, there are some great resources from Bernardo Castro himself that can walk you through it step by step. I'll link to those in the episode description. All right, let's get into it. Here's my conversation with the brilliant Bernardo Castro. Hi, Renardo. It's such an honor to have you here. Welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Well, before we dive into your ideas around analytic idealism, I was wondering if you could maybe share with the audience the story of how it was that you started to really question the basic tenets of materialism or physicalism. I was a young engineer. I had just worked on some artificial neural natural natural. at CERN as part of the data acquisition system. We didn't use that. We ended up using something else that I was working on as well. But it sort of brought me into the world of artificial intelligent machines. And a couple of years after that, I started thinking, you know, we could build a neuronal network and artificial one that was just as smart as physicists

in identifying what is the physics that's going on in the accelerator. what would it take for us to make it conscious as well for the data processing in that computer to be accompanied by experience just like the data processing in my neurons, my biological neurons. That's how I thought. And after a few years,

sort of banging my head against that question, I realized that the question is wrong. It's like asking what is the marital status of the number five. It's a category mistake, as we say in philosophy. And the underlying assumption that was wrong, and I realized it was that experience or phenomenal consciousness is something that arises out of special physical arrangements somehow. That was wrong, and that was the underlying assumption of my thinking,

and that's why I was facing an alley without an exit. And, you know, when you bang your head long enough on a wall at some point to get enough hurt that you take a step back and you reevaluate what you're doing, And when I did that, it became clear to me that the notion that there is an external world, which there is, it's obvious, an external world beyond our individual minds, that does not entail or imply that such an external world is non-mental. Your thoughts are mental, and they are outside my individual mind. From my perspective, your thoughts are objective. But from their own essential perspective, they are eminently subjective.

Same holds for the world. So the idea was the world is made of mental states. They are not my mental states or your mental states. They are out there, but they are mental still. So there is something it is like to be the world out there. It is a universal mind, if you will. So when we're talking about AI, is it then your opinion that consciousness and intelligence aren't the same thing, that we could create something that is intelligent but that it wouldn't necessarily be conscious? Well, that these two things are different is pre-established. Intelligence has to do with processing data in a clever way to perform certain functions. Consciousness has to do with there being something it is like to process that data. There is subjectivity attached to the data processing in some way. So they are different. Intelligence can be objectively measured.

Consciousness is very hard to measure objectively. And even if at all possible through theories like integrations, information theory, which I think is largely correct, even then it can only indirectly get a measure of consciousness. It's never direct. To know that something is conscious, you need to be that something. So yeah, these are different things. And the emergence of artificial intelligence does not entail or imply the emergence of artificial individual consciousness. And I think it will not get there. Silicon computers will never be conscious of their own private inner life. That's not how it's going to happen. It's a leap of faith,

ungrounded in reason or evidence, to think that these two things come hand in hand. So after you've had that revelation, how did your thinking change and what caused you to arrive at analytic idealism and sort of what is analytic idealism? Analytic idealism is a notion that there is an external world. It's beyond our individual mind, but it too is mental. It is made of experiential or mental states. It is a big mind out there that presents itself to us on the screen of perception as the inanimate universe,

just as my own thoughts and emotions present themselves to you in the form of the matter that constitutes my body. So analytic idealism is the notion that all states in nature are mental and that what we call matter or physical stuff is a cognitive representation of external mental states. And that's always the case. There is no exception to this. And if you work this out, you realize that it's extremely consistent with all evidence,

including evidence that contradicts physicalism or materialism, such as evidence that physical entities do not have standalone existence. You can only speak of a physical entity upon a measurement or an observation. Analytic idealism is consistent with that, because it says the states that are measured, are not physical, they are mental. Physical states are a cognitive representation of the outcome of an observation,

the outcome of a measurement. So of course, physical states only arise upon measurement because they are a representation of the result of that measurement. So this is analytic idealism. It postulates one extra thing, which is the boundary between my individual mental states and the mental states of there,

that boundary is a dissociative boundary. Analytic idealism appeals to the empirically established psychiatric phenomenon called dissociation in which what is essentially one mind can seem to be many because of inferential isolation. We can go into all the technical details of it, but in a nutshell, that's what analytic idealism is. And why did I spend years of my life thinking this through? Well, it was not to write books, even though eventually I started writing books. My first book was written as a sort of a grand summary for myself of my new worldview because I was, you know, from very early educated, you know, as a very rationalist

and particularly driven mind from very early on. My first job when I was 22 years old was at CERN in Switzerland, a big particle accelerator. So I had this mindset that to relate to the world, I need to have a working theory about what the world is and how I relate to it. I have to have a story in terms of which to make sense of reality. It's very difficult for me to live in a vacuum, in a theoretical vacuum, and just say, well, it's a great mystery, and here we are, walking in the mystery.

Well, I am psychologically unable to accept that and not fight it. So once I realized that physicalism just didn't add up, because there is no conceivable, coherent way to come from physical parameters to the qualities of experience. in order to say that the qualities of experience somehow emerge out of physical parameters. Once you realize that that makes absolutely no sense and leads you to an alley without an exit, you start desperately looking for another way to make sense of what's around you, another way to make sense of yourself, your own mind.

And I did that, not to write books because I desperately needed it. And eventually it converged to what is today analytic idealism. and I had written already extensive notes from myself. When I looked at it after a few years, I thought, there is a book here. So I shopped around and somebody decided to publish it and the rest is history. 11 books since then. How does your, how does analytic idealism relate to, say, the ideas of Donald Hoffman? They dovetail extremely well.

Dawn says nature is an interplay of conscious agents. And what we call the physical world are cognitive representations in those conscious agents. In other words, there is nothing but mental states out there. And there are these different agents that interact with one another. And when they interact, outcomes what we call the screen of perception, the world around us. Where analytic idealism makes one step further, although Dawn has been working on new versions of his theoretical framework that probably will converge here too.

And then there will be no point of departure, but analytic idealism will go further and say, the conscious agents are themselves reducible to one field of subjectivity. We don't need to have at least two fundamental conscious agents in order to have an interaction between agents and creates the so-called physical world. You can boil everything down to one field of subjectivity and the different dynamics, the different states of nature,

which are myriad, incredibly rich, infinite, almost. Those are different patterns of excitation of this field of subjectivity. And each pattern of excitation is a particular experience with particular qualities, such as the redness of an apple, the sweetness of strawberries, a bellyache, or the bitterness of disappointment. These are patterns of excitations of the one underlying field. And the one underlying field of subjectivity, which is not limited to me or you, but spans all existence, is the only thing that ultimately exists, everything else can be reduced to patterns of excitations or geometrical configurations of this

underlying field of subjectivity. The moment Dawn brings his theory from interactions between conscious agents to something else that grounds the very conscious agents in a unity, that's the day when he and I will be saying the same thing in different way. I in the language of philosophy, he in the language of science. That's such an important point, I think. I've seen in myself and in other people that I've talked to about this subject, that letting go of materialism or physicalism is one thing, but then really starting to accept

that the nature of the world is mental can be a hard barrier to overcome because we tend to think if our life is something like a dream, then why doesn't it behave in the way that a dream does? Like last night, a character from a TV show I just watched was with me in my old high school, you know, so why is it that the world seems to continue on regardless of what we think about it? And I think that that's a hard concept sometimes for people to grasp. Well, the answer is because when you dream at night, the dream is in you. It's your individual mind that's generating the dream and it's unword. It can do whatever it wants. But in the case of reality, this dream around us is not ours. We are inserted in the mental

activity of something else that we have no control over. And this bigger mind, we have. within which we are inserted because we are dissociated aspects of it, it didn't have to be subject to the natural selection pressures that individual human minds were selected for. Our minds have evolved in this planetary ecosystem, this rock we call Earth, and it has evolved to do the best it can in the face of limited ecosystem resources, limited ecosystem opportunities and plenty of ecosystem threats. So our mind has evolved to be reactive.

And reactive minds tend to behave in irregular ways because they have to react to irregular environmental challenges and opportunities. And our dreams reflect that our dreams are sort of crazy. They are not unpredictable. If you study that psychology, you realize that our dreams are fairly mechanical too, even though we don't experience them like that. Our dreams are very predictable, but they come across as well. being unpredictable because they are the product of minds that evolved to be reactive.

The mind of nature at large didn't evolve in a planetary ecosystem. It didn't have to fight for resources. So it is regular. What it does is a product of what it is, of its, to speak psychological language, what it does is a reflection of its universal archetypes. It does what it does because it is what it is. And because it's not inserted in a challenging ecosystem, it always does what it does because it does.

It is what it is. It doesn't have to react to external challenges and opportunities. It just expresses itself regularly and spontaneously. And therefore, the laws of physics are very irregular and predictable because they are representations in the screen of perception of the internal mental dynamics of these minds that surrounds us. As you've kind of gone through all of this thinking, you have ended up writing a fair amount about the UFO phenomenon.

So what is it about the UFO phenomenon? that fascinated you and caused you to kind of, you know, you wrote your book meaning and absurdity, mostly really focusing on the UFO phenomenon. What did that look like for you? Well, I had a sighting when I was, I think 10 years old. I don't remember exactly when that occurred, even though I remember the event very well. And that always stayed with me, that particular memory from childhood, that one absurd event that I never, registered as a dream. Can I put my hand on the Bible and swear to you with 100% certainty it was not a dream? No, but then I couldn't do that for any other memory of my childhood. For all I

know, I dreamed it all up. But this one feels to me as real as any other real event of my childhood. And it stayed in my mind how reality that seems so predictable and regular and well-behaved suddenly can go haywire, can become crazy, inconsistent, incoherent. How does that happen? Why the hell is this that stayed with me? As a kid that I was even annoyed when I saw that thing, which fascinates me more than the thing itself, why a 10-year-old gets pissed off when he sees a OAP?

I mean, I would imagine that a 10-year-old becomes afraid or experiences awe and surprise, extreme curiosity. I didn't have any of these. I was not afraid. I was not curious. I was not in awe. I was pissed off. It's like that thing was breaking the rules of the game.

We agreed at some point to play. It was bloody cheating. And I wanted it to get the hell out of there. So that stayed with me. And I, you know, every now and then I come back to it and try to account for it in a naturalistic way. We'll be right back after this quick break. I really identify with that because I had actually been doing this podcast

and spending all of my time on UFOs for over a year before I realized that I've actually had another UFO sighting when I was 21. But because it didn't look like what I thought a UFO should look like, and because I just didn't know even what to do with the memory at all, I just kind of forgot about it. Like I didn't forget about it. I would think about it sometimes, but it's weird how UFOs in some ways kind of repel our attention. Yeah.

And like we don't want to engage with them on some level. Yeah, exactly the same thing happened to me. As a kid, I thought UFOs were lights in the night sky. Now, this thing happened at noon in a bright, sunny day, and it had no lights. It was pretty opaque, whiteish, silvery, but rather opaque. And it was absurd. It had these little strips behind. behind it that were flapping around.

It's like a cartoon. Like a cartoon on Sunday morning, on television. So it wasn't what I associated with the idea of a UFO. And it flew three meters in front of my head. I know it because there was a tree on the other side, and it flew in front of the tree. And the tree was like five to ten meters away from me. So that thing was almost at an arm's length rich in front of my eyes,

and it was about a meter long. So it was not at all where I expected. I grew up with close encounters of the third kind. You know, UFOs are lights in the night sky, and they move, they are dynamic, they're beautiful, they're shiny. Not that absurd thing, you know, at noon with the sun shining bright in a blue sky. And then afterwards, although the thought always remained with me, it is amazing how much it does not influence your life to the extent that you would expect. I was never looking back, think, oh my God, that happened to me.

No, I am incredibly, there's a French word. I don't know if it's acceptable in English. There's a French word called Blazé. I'm very blaze about it. Like, I don't care much about that particular mystery. What stayed with me was the annoyance, that curiosity about why was a 10-year-old kid annoyed? Of all things you could experience.

Why annoyance? That stayed with me, but I went on to work in particle physics, computer engineering, and none of that was informed at all by that citing. I don't even find it, the citing itself, I don't find it surprising or mysterious. I don't know why, because obviously it is mysterious. What stayed with me is the surprise about my reaction, not about the thing in itself. The thing in itself, it's amazing how blasé I am about it. It's like, whatever.

You know, it's just one of those things. Who cares? You know, didn't obey the laws of physics, but, no, I'm not going to die because of it. You know, I don't need to understand it. It's not important. It's like there is something in the back of my mind saying the thing as it is, it's not important. Don't spend your time bothering about explaining that thing. It doesn't matter.

What is interesting is why you reacted the way you did. That's what stayed with me. It is interesting because so many stories of UFO encounters involve that element of people behaving in a way in response to this sighting that seems nonsensical or absurd, where they'll stay and watch some fantastic thing happen in the sky. And then they'll just like go back in and watch television and not even, you know, like you think you're going to pick up your phone or you're going to try to take a video or you're going to maybe call the police or. you're going to call your friend, but a lot of people just kind of move on. And then when they realize later and they look back on that, they can't explain why it was that they behaved in the way that they behaved. So what is it about that kind of absurdity that just causes it to kind of just wash off of us or we just, we can't engage with it? If only I knew the answer

to that, Kelly. I can again speculate more or less in an informed manner, not because I'm a philosopher and a scientist, but because I experience the thing. It has to do, has something to do with the lost memories. I mean, I'm hardly saying anything here because I'm not telling you how or what do memories have to do with it. I don't know, but my gut feeling is that we react the way we do because there is something we know that we don't remember. And if we remember that, we would go like, oh, of course I react the way it did.

know what I mean? So there is a memory there that informs our behavior, but cannot be accessed metaconsciously. We cannot access that memory introspectively, but it is there in the body informing how we behave. Just like so many other memories do exactly that. Your childhood traumas that you don't remember, they inform the way you react to things,

how you feel about things, what you're afraid of, what you're not, who you're falling in love with, or you don't. These are all the behaviors triggered by memories that we can no longer access introspectively. And that's what I recognize. I recognize this pattern that in some instances are very easy to account for. You know, when you're three years old, a dog beat you. And even if you don't remember that, when you're a 30 year old and there is a dog barking, you experience fear. and you don't remember that a dog beat you.

So I think I identified the same pattern here. I was annoyed with that thing because there is something we as humans don't remember, but which nonetheless informs our behavior from a very, very deep level inside our minds. But I don't know what it is. So I guess it could be that if we share this mental world together, that maybe things like UFOs are coming from somewhere outside of that,

and we just don't have what it takes to deal with it, maybe? Well, to put UAPs or UFOs together with analytic idealism, I think where it does help, where analytic idealism does help, is that most people, you know, if you look at all the testimonies like Jacques collected, the Jacques Valet collected over the years, you see that the phenomenon has as many physical, characteristics, like can be picked up by radar. It can dump material on the ground that can be collected, can be photographed. But it has as many physical characteristics as it has

mental characteristics. People experience emotions, feelings, and messages in their own minds when they are observing a UAP, messages that were not conveyed through words or anything. There seems to be some form of telepathy involved. The very behavior of the phenomenon seems to acquiesce to our expectations. The phenomenon takes the shape of the expectations of a certain juncture in history in a certain culture. At some point, the phenomenon were ferries. At another point, late in the 19th century, it was airships.

And then it became flying saucers and then triangles which resemble stealth bombers. So the thing seems to take the question. clothing that appeals to us symbolically at a certain juncture in history, given a certain cultural milieu. This is mental stuff. Mental stuff behaves like this. Your dreams evoke symbolic meaning by taking on the clothes of the cultural paraphernalia that you can relate with.

That's how dreams operate. That's even how near-death experiences operate. If you're a Hindu, you see Krishna. If you're a Christian, you see Christ. but the figure behind that is doing the same thing, has the same kind of patterns of behavior. The UAP seems to have that. I don't know whether what we call UAP is one or more phenomena.

In saying what I'm saying now, I am assuming that it's one. So I'm attributing those mental characteristics to all instances of the phenomenon. Many instances certainly have that. Now, under materialism, this is difficult to account for because if physical stuff is fundamentally non-mental, there is absolutely no reason for us to conceive of physical stuff

as having mental characteristics. Why would it have? It's dead stuff. It's not experiential. It's not mental. It's not symbolic. It's not metaphorical. It doesn't react to our own inner mentation.

It is what it is, regardless of our culture, regardless of what point in history you are. It doesn't change because we don't believe in fairies anymore, but we believe in spaceships. Physical stuff doesn't change because of that, but mental stuff does. So analytic idealism can help us make sense of this dual characteristics of the phenomenon.

They are as much physical as they seem to be mental. Under analytic idealism, what we call physicality is a representation of mentation. Everything is inherently mental. So it should come as no surprise that the phenomenon has mental characteristics and physical ones, because that's how we represent

external mental characteristics. That's what we do. And that's what matter is. It's a perceptual representation of inner mental processes. So their analytic idealism can go a long way in helping dissolve contradictions that we project onto the phenomenon because we have these materialist biases and unexamined assumptions and prejudices. We think that it's incoherent for the thing to be both mental and physical. The moment you realize that that inconsistence is a projection of our own lack of understanding and that nature as it is in itself is mental too. Actually, it's only mental. Physicality is how it appears, that that meditation appears to us. If you understand this, then there is nothing incoherent about the phenomenon. It can still be a very natural, real

thing going on out there. In your book, meaning and absurdity, you talk about, the UFO phenomenon as the call of the absurd. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of meaning we can find in these kind of absurd and incoherent experiences? Philosophically, and it is pretty rigorous, it's pretty academic what I'm about to say. Logic is an arbitrary set of assumptions, of axioms. You cannot logically defend the validity of logic. without circular reasoning.

To logically defend the validity of logic, you have to assume that logic is valid, which is the very point in contention. So we call it begging the question in philosophy. You cannot argue for the validity of logic without begging the question. Logic is arbitrary. We adopt it unconditionally

because the axioms of logic seem self-evident to us and seem to dispense with the need for argument or proof. I mean, it's self-evident that if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. We think that's self-evident. That's one of the five axioms of our current logic, which is called Aristotelian logic. Another one is the so-called law of excluded middle. Every statement about nature is either true or false.

It cannot be both and it cannot be neither. that's the law of excluded middle. It's another axiom of aristotelian logic. There are five. But Aristotelian logic is not the only logic that is out there. There is also, for instance, intuitionistic logic, which gets rid of the law of excluded middle. And it's important.

Bear with me. If you believe in the law of excluded middle, then things are either true or false. They cannot be neither and they cannot be both. So you can prove that something exists by proving that it cannot not exist. Right? If you prove that it cannot be false,

then it can only be true. That's the consequence. And what this means is that you can prove the existence of things that you know nothing about. You don't even have a single example of them. You don't know what they are. I don't know what you're talking about. Just because you abstractly proved

that they cannot not exist, you've proven that something you've never seen that you can't even conceive an example of exists. This doesn't seem to be valid, right? I mean, all the axioms of logic, once you start elaborating on their implications, you find reasons to question them all. And what I'm trying to say with this is that empirically, logic seems to hold most of the time. We think logically, because logic self-evident to us, and we applied that to nature, and most of the times it works. But sometimes it doesn't. And that's what we call high strangeness phenomenon.

And they have been reported throughout history. Obviously, they are as much a part of nature as the rest that behaves nicely and well-behaved, according to our aristotelian logic. But we set those aside because otherwise we would have to contradict our prejudices, our ways of thinking. But nature doesn't give a damn that logic seems self-evident to us. Nature is what it is. It doesn't care what we think is logical or not. Nature does what it does, irrespective of us.

It's external mental states. They are out there. And that's the difficulty we have. We are primates that have been running around this block for about two or three hundred thousand years. In other words, the blink of an eye and sporting an intellect for only about 30 to 50,000 years, which is not even the blink of an eye. It just happened.

It just happened. And we think that these extremely young, newborn of an intellect can make sense of everything that is salient about nature. And if there are things that it cannot make sense of, then those things cannot exist. That's incredibly silly. It's absurd. So I think that the invitation from nature is to confront us, which it has been doing since the dawn of time, with things that do not behave according to what we think they should be doing or not,

stuff that doesn't behave according to our logic. The invitation is, have a better look. Review your assumptions. Reveal your prejudices. There is more going on between heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy or ratio. And that's what we have to keep on reminding ourselves off. It's very comfy, but also arrogant, to say, well, I understand things and whatever I seem to be unable to understand, it's not true. Yeah, then you go to sleep well, but you're just fooling yourself.

you're making a clown of yourself. That's not the right philosophical or scientific attitude. Thank you for that. The call of the absurd reminds me of in the hero's journey, the call to adventure, where there's this moment where the hero recognizes that the world that they live in isn't quite what they thought it was. And if they accept that call, which, you know, as we're talking about, a lot of times we don't accept that call.

We hang up. We're like, no, thank you. But if you accept that call, that it kickstarts. this process, much like in the hero's journey, where you kind of have to face that new reality and integrate it in some way. And so I've long wondered if maybe the reason that we like the hero's journey so much, the reason that it kind of appears everywhere is that maybe it's some kind of algorithm of consciousness or something like that that's meant to push us in those directions. I wonder what you think of that. Absolutely. I mean, Jack Vallet's work on the control

system, there it is. It has everything you need to know. Maybe my only caution about Jacques's work, as it was in the 70s, when he came up with the idea of the control system, is that in the 70s, he seemed to be pretty negative about it. He positioned it as a malicious thing. Or at least that's what comes through in the book. Maybe he didn't intend it that way, and maybe it's my fault that I read it that way, it could be my own prejudice. But I read his 1970s books as talking about this control system with an underlying suggestion that it is malicious, it's manipulative, as opposed to being a natural feedback mechanism of the great consciousness that reality is,

a consciousness that is trying to figure itself out, because that's what minds do, minds trying to figure themselves out. And if the mind of nature is trying to figure itself out, then it will have a built-in autonomous, instinctive control mechanism to expose itself to those parts of itself that it still has not got a handle on, that it still didn't make sense of. And that's the control system. It's a control system that doesn't allow us to become very comfortable with a partial story about what's going on.

It wants us to go further. It wants us to get to the bottom of things. And why does it want it to? Because that's what we want. That's what minds do. This is a primordial archetype of mentation that minds try to figure things out, especially themselves.

So to me, this control mechanism is woven into the very fabric of nature, which is a mental fabric. Nature wants to figure itself out. And when it realizes that some parts of it that are in a good position to make steps forward got stuck in a local minimum

because they found that, okay, this is comfortable where we are, there is still some weird stuff, but we pretend that it doesn't exist. When we find ourselves in this position of sort of settling in, it ramps up the antique. It tries to kick us out of that local minimum in order to give us a chance to find the global minimum, a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what's going on, more self-aware, more sophisticated understanding of what's going on without or with less prejudice, with less unexamined assumptions.

So to me, this control system that Jacques wrote extensively about, it's not malicious. It's as part of us, and it's part of nature at large. It's instinctive. It's an archetype. Its nature is at its best. It's morally neutral. It's just trying to figure itself out. It's not malicious, not trying to deceive anyone for the sake of deceiving.

It's just that sometimes to dislodge minds from a certain local minimum. you need some form of spell, some sort of enchantment to confront those minds with things that those minds are not yet ready to account for and therefore dislodge those minds. To me, that's what's going on. But I don't have any more evidence for it than you can find in Jacques's books. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. I really agree with that read of the control mechanism. One thing I will say, though, is that I, so before I got it,

into all this weird UFO stuff, I was a marketer. And so I actually really came to the idea of the hero's journey as some sort of like an algorithm or a technology because I found that it was really good at driving people to particular actions. I've always said marketing is like psychology for sociopaths and I'm glad I don't do it anymore. But it does seem like it can be weaponized against us in some ways. I agree with you that I don't think that that's what these high strangeness events are necessarily doing. But I think that you can see in our media and that sort of thing, that it can be used, at the very least, to very much distract us, if not to control what we think about things sometimes.

Of course, this is a very human thing. And then the airwaves are saturated with it. This began after the Second World War in the West, because the Germans figured out what PR is. propaganda. And at the time, it was made possible for the first time because you had radios. And now radio TVs, but radios were the thing. And unlike print in which, you know, at least at the time, writing was sober, didn't have much emotional nuance to it. Radio, with radio, you're communicating not only with words, but with inflection, with tone. You communicate so much more. There are so many layers of meaning with radio.

which Hitler used to maximum effect. He was an extremely good orator. He would mobilize this archetype of forces in a people that was suffering at the time. Germany was suffering from hyperinflation because of the conditions in which the First World War ended. And the German propagandists weaponized it to extremely high effect. And the West realized it. And so after the end of the Second World War, they studied how it was done by the Germans and they improved on it. And that became PR and eventually became consumer marketing,

not business to business marketing. I've done that. It's a very different beast. It's much more objective, you know, much more rational grounded. But consumer markets and political campaigning are weaponizations of this way to manipulate people by seizing what they think is important to them and then weaponizing it for somebody else's agenda. So they latch on to what's important to you, which may have nothing to do with somebody else's agenda, but they latch on to what's important to you and through discrete intelligent steps of manipulation,

they mobilize you as a force to achieve their agenda. So this is in marketing, this is in politics, this is what's happening. This is reality right now. We have become disconnected with the true reality. What we take for reality is this conceptual tiling of the world around us that is created by propaganda, marketing, political campaigning. We have become very disconnected from what is truly going on.

Absolutely. To shift gears a little bit, I'd love to circle back to an idea you touched on a little earlier, this idea that the phenomenon can be both mental and physical at the same time. time. You recently wrote an article on UAPs and non-human intelligence where you actually argued that we're perhaps looking at two different phenomena when we're looking at nuts and bolts UAP versus kind of the more high strangeness events. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little. Yeah, that is a tentative hypothesis that we are talking about two things here. I am not married to it. I would prefer to think that we're talking about only one.

thing. But in science, a mistake people often make is to conflate two different things as if they were only one. And then it becomes impossible to account for it because what you think is one phenomenon has internally contradictory features, which throws you for a loop. But if you'd realize that you're talking about two different things, then those internal contradictions disappear because these are two different phenomena. So in science, often it is important to start from the assumption that we are seeing two different things and then wait for positive evidence that it's in fact only one thing and then make that step.

But to not put them together already from the beginning when it's clear that there are features that are internally contradictory if you do that. So I'm saying this because my separating the issue is a methodological step, not a reflection of what I actually think is going on. But the methodological step is important because the high strangeness part of the phenomenon, although it has obvious physical characteristics, like it can be picked up by radar,

it can be photographed, it leaves the physical traces that can be brought to a laboratory and analyzed. It has certain spectral outputs that can be measured. It is also a kind of changeling. It adapts to the witness. it adapts to the observer. It seems to communicate directly with the observer. And those are the high strangeness aspects of the phenomenon. They seem to violate not only physics, but our very logic,

which may be the very point of the control system, by the way. It needs to do that if it is to dislodge us. So this is how I understood the phenomenon until 2017. I would expect that the phenomenon has physical characteristics, but not stable ones. In other words, yes, there is something in the sky that can be picked up by radar, but one person sees one thing, another person will see another thing, and both can be picked up by radar, but the other physical aspects are changing, they are adapting. They have this high strangeness feature. And if that is true, if that's all there is to the phenomenon, I would doubt you can take one of those things and put it in a hanger for 70 years. And it looks the same still, regardless of who enters the hangar and pulls out. an x-ray machine to try to figure out what it is. I would also not expect that aliens whose physical appearance

adapt not only to the witness, but the state of mind of the witness. If you read Whitley-Streber's latest called Them, which I recommend, there is one instance in which a witness sees three aliens and then starts wondering why they have no hair. And then instantly one of the aliens grows a full head of hair. in front of her. So this is the high strangeness part. This is the mental control system.

I would not expect you to be able to take that alien, kill it, and put it in a freezer for 70 years, and go back and have a look, and it's still the same. I wouldn't expect you to be able to slice, you know, pieces of tissue to put under a microscope. I would not expect any of these things. But then David Grush. And although as far as we know publicly, David did not witness things themselves,

I think it is impossible to dismiss what he's saying by assuming completely arbitrarily that he's lying or that he's crazy, like some people did. Some physics professors, very famous ones, insulted a veteran who was in harm's way to defend his country. I find this just abominable. I feel nauseous about this. I will name the physicist, Sean Carroll. So I feel, because I'm too committed to truth, I feel I am unable to dismiss what David has been saying,

especially because it's being sort of confirmed by several other people who are willing to put their names. They are not giving interviews in which only a silhouette appears and their voices are distorted and they are described as a senior intelligence official. No, it's their names. They are who they say they are. This is not in question.

We are not back to the 1980s and Bob Lazar. These people are who they say they are. They studied where they say they studied. They worked where they say they worked. None of this is in question. And it's the first time that this happens. So I find anything possible not to take it seriously. But that raises the question.

If these things are in hangars for 70 years and in freezers for 70 years, is this the same thing as the high strangeness phenomenon? My methodological answer would be to say, forget about what I think or what you think. Methodologically, we have to start by saying, there are two different things, and we have to wait for positive evidence that it justifies merging them.

That's my point. Absolutely. I love that you brought up Whitley-Sheber's book, them. It's one of my favorites And something that I admire so much about Whitley is that he's able, I mean, not just able, he's really lived his life kind of in the midst of the highest of strangeness. And yet when we were out at the Soul Foundation conference in November, Whitley stood up and made the point that we actually don't have evidence to directly link

the nuts and bolts UAP phenomenon with, you know, the abductions and high strangeness and all of that. So I think that this methodological choice that you're making is actually a really important one because they could be the same phenomenon. But we actually, we don't have any strong piece of evidence to link them. We notice that they're kind of similar-ish because there's stuff that comes down from the sky that we don't quite understand. I find that very fascinating. But if we follow that line of inquiry, you kind of put forward a hypothesis in that paper about what the nuts and bolt phenomenon could be. if in fact we're talking about two different things.

And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit. What the nuts and boats could be. We have this popular notion that we understood pretty much how life evolved on this planet. And we figured out all the creatures that ever existed, what they were capable of and not, because we have an extensive fossil record, and we have genetic analysis,

and these things that lived before left remnants. So whatever happened that we have no remnants indicating, then it didn't happen. Because if it had happened, we would have some archaeological evidence, some evidence in the fossil record, you know, the geologist at some point would have found. This is naive. The Earth's crust, especially the ocean crust, the continents sort of float on top. But the ocean crust is recycled. every tens, maybe 100, maybe 150 million years.

In other words, whatever was at the bottom of the oceans, which is two-thirds of the planet's surface, whatever was on the bottom of the ocean, after 150 million years, it has been recycled. It has gone down into the mantle. It has been melted into nothing, become mineral again,

and re-emerged through volcanic activity. In other words, no remnants on the ocean crust from more than 150 million years ago would have survived. Whatever happened on this planet's crust in the oceans, less, more than 150 million years ago, is not there to be seen. It has been reforged in the cauldron of magma under our feet. Even the continental crust, which is recycled more slowly, so we can still find stuff from 1.8 to billion years ago

in some places like Iceland, only few places where the crust has not been recycled for 2 billion years. So it recycles more slowly, but even the continental crest is recycled too. Hawaii is being recycled every day. And the Mediterranean, the Ring of Fire and the Pacific, this stuff is being recycled. So it is entirely.

plausible and consistent with the evidence that we do have that there could have been other animal species on this planet that has since the Cambrian explosion billions of years ago that have evolved to become intelligent, to develop a civilization, to develop technology, and then died because of any of the myriad things that can put an end to any civilization like solar storms, supernova explosions in our galactic neighborhood,

comet or asteroid impact which wiped out the dinosaurs, a runaway climate change, which has happened several times before. The Earth was once a snowball. Very few people know, but about 2 billion years ago, the Earth was a snowball. Pandemics. Any number of things can end the civilization. And we know from our own case that a species that has become intelligent

like ours, 30,000 years ago, we've developed the ability to think conceptually, symbolically. That's when we became intelligent. In 30,000 years, you can have the birth of intelligence, the full development of a technological civilization that goes to space, its end, and then no traces being left behind after 150 million years. Now, the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years.

And life has been on it for four billion years. 150 million years to erase the remnants, say, of an aquatic industrial civilization, is nothing. Could have happened multiple times over. There could have been animals on this planet that are not aliens, but which have developed technology at an industrial scale. And they would have left no trace behind. This is called the DeCillurian hypothesis.

And it has been published for the first time in an academic. journal in 2018. If this happened and any of the myriad things that could put an end to a civilization then happened, there would have been remnants. Just like if we end tomorrow in a nuclear war or asteroid impact or solar storm, if we end tomorrow, some of us will leave. And they will go underground or underwater because, you know, the surface of the planet is extremely fragile, vulnerable, like the dinosaurs found out, to asteroid impact,

vulnerable to weather that can destroy your food sources, can destroy your places of living, vulnerable to space radiation, like supernova explosion that would fry all of us if it happened tomorrow. And it has happened in the past on this planet. We have evidence for that. So they would be aware of all this. And the few remnants that would have survived and maintained some of their technology, because their technology would probably be miniaturized by now,

would not require large industrial parks, just like the direction we are going with 3D printing modular nuclear reactors that you can bury in your backyard. We are going the same direction. They would have had that, and they would probably make a home for themselves under the roof and let the monkeys run amok on the roof. That's us.

So it is entirely plausible and natural, and it requires nothing that we don't know has happened before, we know this planet can generate intelligent life. We know civilizations can evolve and go extinct in a mere 16,000 years, 12, maybe. We know all of this. So it could have happened before,

and we know that if it did, it most likely would not have left any archaeological or geological signs in the record. So the nuts and boats UFOs may be just as terrestrial as we are. And if that is the case, then the behavior we see them have is entirely consistent with this hypothesis. Because, you know, aliens from another planet don't need to come here all the time to do a survey of the planet and the human species. They have been doing this for thousands of years. You don't need that. You don't need to be here all the time for a survey. But they are here

all the time. And they seem to be exquisitely interested in military activity. in a nuclear site. In other words, stuff that can ruin the house. So you let the monkeys run amok on the roof for as long as they cannot destroy the house, but once they start getting capable of ruining the whole thing,

you would become very interested in monitoring the situation because it's your home too. So their behavior is entirely consistent with the notion that they are terrestrial. They're not human, but they are terrestrial. And I think this is the simpler hypothesis, and methodologically, we should separate this from the high strangeness phenomenon. However, informed by analytic idealism, there could be a way to reconcile the two and realize that they are not two, in fact, that they are two different phases or aspects of the same thing. An advanced civilization on earth, if it survived long enough, would have understood that.

reality is mental and would have figured out ways to hack it just like we will do imagine where we will be 500 years from now look at where we were 500 years ago 1524 look at our development in terms of science philosophy technology look at where we are now now project another 500 years into the future with all the exponential growth of innovation and you realize that we too in 500 years probably will be able to to hack the mind of nature. And then physical law, physical limitations, we have a much lesser meaning.

It will become a game, not something that rules your life. They may have achieved that. And they may be part of the control system. Maybe this whole thing, maybe the monkeys on the roof are an experiment. We don't know. But until we have positive reasons

to start speculating in this direction, I think we should keep these two things separate and go for the simplest, most naturalistic explanation that we can possibly have, and that's what I tried to do in that article. What I love about all of this is that it suggests that the world is much we're than we've been told. And it seems like we're at this phase of human development where suddenly we're starting

to realize that physicalism isn't the whole story. And we're perhaps even starting to realize that there's non-human intelligences that are here and maybe of all. always been here. And, you know, there's the rise of AI at the same time. And there's so much happening at once. It does feel like we're on the cusp of a really big shift. What do you make of this moment in time and all of this is kind of happening at once? We are clearly on the cusp of a shift that is already happening in terms of our understanding of nature from a metaphysical perspective. Already, today, the mainstream positioning philosophy of mind is that mental states are not

reducible to physical state. This is mainstream already. So physicalism and philosophy of mind is no longer really mainstream. It's still alive, to some extent surviving, but most philosophers of mind and most honest, open neuroscientists already acknowledge that we cannot explain experience purely in terms of the physical aspects of the brain. There is something else going on here. This doesn't mean dualism doesn't necessarily even mean idealism, but it's this realization that there is more going on than we thought than we would like to think that is already happening. We are not at the stage yet where the culture has converged, has achieved some kind of consensus around an alternative. I think we are well on the way to that. I think the alternative will be some form of objective

idealism, such as analytic idealism. This is happening. At the same time, Kelly, There is a sense in which we have always been in a transition moment. Our parents thought the same. Their parents thought the same. The Second World War was a transition moment. The end of the Cold War was a transition moment. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was a transition moment. Colonialism in the 16th century was a transition moment.

Now, civilizations are ending all the time. The Roman Empire ended in the 4th century. and we went back to a primitive state of life for a thousand years before the Renaissance. A thousand years of going backwards before the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. And our ancestors have always been wrong about a great many issues. What's the chance that we aren't?

Zero! What's the chance that monkeys that have been sporting and intellect for about 30,000 years have understood everything there is to be understood about nature, I mean, it's ludicrous. There's a lot more going on than we dream of. And we're being in the middle of that mystery. What is different now is that when it came to our ancestors,

they were more open to the mystery. They were more open to the idea that there's more going on and they can figure out. But we, since the middle of the 19th century, we've developed this tendency to think that we figured it all out. We want to believe that. And every time that science and philosophy prove us wrong,

we make one small step forward and say, now we really have figured it out. Lord Kelvin said in the turn of the 20th century, that physics was done. That all we needed to do now was dot the eyes and cross the T's, more refined measurement. And then came Einstein and special relativity. And then came Bohr and the other folks with quantum mechanics.

How wrong could the men, have been poor Lord Kelvin. But we are attached to this notion that we now figured it out. And the reason for that, now it's a lot of sociology, cultural history here, but when, as Nietzsche said, when we killed God around the middle of the 19th century and we stopped believing in transcendence, we stopped believing in mystery. We became Prometheus like creatures. We thought we had the fire of the gods. We thought we figured it all out. And the psychological need to believe this preposterous idea has to do with closure. We need to have a sense of closure.

And psychologically, this is an expression of what psychologists call, forgot the technical expression now. It's a way to compensate when you lose a source of meaning in your life. You need to fluid compensation is the name. Fluid compensation is when you lose a source of meaning, you fluidly and instinctively look for another source of meaning because we are meaning-seeking animals. We need meaning in our lives.

Transcendence was a sort of meaning. The notion that you are embedded in a great mystery, that there is a higher purpose that is not accessible to us, provides great meaning. And that's what religion used to give people. But around the middle of the 19th century, we didn't really believe that anymore. We lost that source of meaning because we lost transcendence.

So we needed to fluidly compensate. What is another source of meaning? It's closure. And we know that. Every time that the family loses a soldier, the soldier loses their lives abroad. And the family needs closure by bringing the soldier's body back and bearing him at Arlington Cemetery. You know, that's closure. It gives us closure and closure gives us meaning.

The fallen soldier's life served a purpose. And we highlight that to ourselves by going through the rituals of closure. science and philosophy would have done the same. The moment they lost a relationship with the mystery, a relationship with transcendence, they had to believe that they figured it all out because that's closure. You know, you get one up on the universe.

No, you can't stop the universe from killing you with gamma rays and cell decay. You can't stop it. You are going to die, but at least we figured it out. We got one up on the universe. We understood the bully. We can't stop the bully from killing us,

but we understood it. We got one up on it. This is incredibly unhealthy. It is natural. It is psychologically natural, but incredibly unhealthy. And we are going through a phase now in which we are being confronted with the fact that we do not actually have closure. And this is painful because we have to fluidly compensate again. Which way?

Well, back to mystery. It's the only way there is. Everything else is artificial. So that's the big transition now. And it's unique in history because it's the first time that we are transiting back to mystery, having denied mystery for one and a half century. That is unique. Well, I can't think of a better place to leave it. Bernardo, thank you so much for this conversation.

This has been an absolute joy for me. And it's so wonderful to have you. Thanks for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. Now receiving frequency. So if you take tarot the way that pop culture portrays it, which is that the cards themselves have some kind of hidden power to predict your future. The jury is very much out.

However, if I were to do my own taro and have such a connection with my own subconscious that when I see these symbols, I could apply any meaning to it, and I basically use it as a way to explore my unconscious and subconscious mind, There's a lot of things that you don't know that you know that are buried deep inside of you through things like meditation and therapy and all of that. You get these epiphanies that bring it out. And I think that symbols are another method to do that, these kinds of internal excavations. And so it actually doesn't require a belief in the supernatural, although it totally helps.