Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Bernardo Kastrup: Consciousness & Superdeterminism Doubts (#272)

Episode Date: November 13, 2022

Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of 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 (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, 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). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. Bernardo’s most recent book is The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com. Connect with me: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast-  Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is your brain a computer? Are the thoughts and emotions and sensations that you have merely the result of icons being clicked on a vast desktop? Or are you actually a computer in a simulation? I know if I was a computer, I'd be a Toshiba satellite from the mid-1990s running my favorite operating system of all time, Windows 95. Today's guest thinks none of that is true and actually pushes back on past guest Sabina Hasenfelder and her notions of superdeterminism, and you're going to hear all of that. Plus, if you go to my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, you'll see a very delightful slideshow put on by today's guest, another BK. Not just Brian Keating, you've got BK squared at Bernardo Castro, who is a double PhD,

not even an MD PhD, like past guest and upcoming guest, Jay Batacharga, is. They're actually a double PhD in computer science and philosophy held by Bernardo Castro, and you won't want to miss his delightful slides and presentation. You can find that on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. And I took questions at the end of this, so stay tuned for that. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for the following reason. You'll be the first to know when guests like Bernardo are coming on the podcast. And you can ask him questions in advance and be notified when you can ask him questions live like this episode was recorded. You can also ask him questions on Twitter at Bernardo Castro and ask me questions to ask any of my guest

at Dr. Brian Keating on Twitter. And I hope that you'll also take the opportunity to subscribe to my mailing list. You can perhaps win some pan-psychically conscious. meteorite samples that I am offering to the next 100 subscribers to the podcast mailing list, Briankeying.com slash list. Got a lot of cool content coming up in the next couple of months. And you won't want to miss upcoming guest on the podcast, Francis Halzin, who is actually the first professor of mine to ever appear on the podcast. I've had my PhD advisor, but you'll hear a conversation with Francis Halzen coming very soon

to your podcast feed wherever you get with these podcasts. But definitely make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel because we're over 75,000 strong over there, about the same number on audio only. Podcast program is really growing at an exponential increasing rate. Maybe we are heading towards a singularity. Maybe Ray Kurzweil was right all along. I don't know. Maybe you don't care, but I do. And I hope that you'll share these episodes on the mailing list and the YouTube channel with your friends so we can continue to grow and move as we will into 2023 on a successful strong footing. That's it. Don't have anything else to advertise. And just thanking you for coming on this voyage with me into a multiverse of minds.

Like today's guest, Dr. Bernardo Castro with Dr. Brian Keating. Two BKs for the price of one. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please, how? One of the most famous BKs in the universe, and that is not me, Brian Keating, but that's Bernardo Castroop, who is joining us all the way from the new. Netherlands who makes him, I think the Netherlands are my second most popular country,

Bernardo. Oh. In terms of, yes, I've had a... Yeah, I just had on Huido Invenz, and I had on more recently Highgo Falka, many, many other Dutch men. I haven't had any Dutch women on, but hopefully I'll get some Dutch women, too. But you know, I have a particular fascination with the Dutch because they invented this device here, which we're going to talk about.

Oh, yes. Which is... And the microscope as well. And the microscope. I think the first name of the person who invented both of them, or part of the name had Hans in it, Hans Leyenhoek and then Hans Lippershaye, although I think Leon Hook had a different other major name. Anyway, I don't know. I should be. You could have up to four given names in the Netherlands. Is that real? Oh, I didn't know that. Wow. And Hans is Johannes. Yes. Oh, that's right. Yes. It's just a short for that. Nobody says Johannes. Nobody. And then their Germany is Hansa, right? Lufthansa is German Airlines, right?

Well, it's a great pleasure to be here. First, I have to acknowledge our interlocutor who set all this up, and that is none other than Kurt Jai Mungle of the theories of everything podcast. I should have pinged him that you'd be on. Maybe I'll direct message him once we get going here. But it's a great treat to have you. on the podcast. Sorry, it's taken so long.

We've got back and forth. We had COVID, et cetera. But I'm so glad you're here, Bernardo. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Brian. And so I want to start just very quickly for those very few people

that may not know who you are. You are a PhD in computer engineering, but you've also done a significant PhD work in philosophy, in particular ontology, which we'll talk about. You've worked in particle physics institutions like CERN and Phillips Research Laboratories,

and he's worked on many, many popularizations for the general audience. He's done a lot of videos, including with past guest Sabina Hasenfelder. Maybe we'll get into that. And then hosted by my friend Kurt. So it's really quite a great honor to meet you and be together finally on the phone. I know it's late there, but we have a lot to cover. So the first thing I want to cover actually does relate, not to the telescope's inventor,

but the telescope's primary user, at least initially, and that's this guy here, Galileo, Galilei, who said something I want you to react to. He said, the job of a scientist is to measure what's measurable and make measurable what is not so, i.e. to build instruments, to build tools, sometimes to build mental models. I want to ask you, to what extent is it really even possible or useful to build all these tools? Are there certain tools that are more useful than others? And your take on what Galileo said. Is that the primary aim of science

to measure what's measurable? I would say the primary aim of science is to predict what's going to happen next and measurement is a way to refine our models so we can predict more accurately maybe i have too much a pragmatic view of science but yeah this thing was inculcated in me since i was very very young you know i landed at cernet at 22 that was my first job so the notion of measurement is directly coupled to the ability for one to develop a predictive model and tell what's going to happen next before it happens. Yeah, so for me, that's the core of science. So I wanted to ask you about the kind of maybe conflicts or maybe you could comment on the work of, in particular Donald Hoffman. When I think about you, I think about different analogies for

consciousness. And I've come to the feeling that it's almost hopeless. I've had on David Chalmers and the corner of the hard problem of consciousness. I want to ask you, where does a professional kind of feel that this notion of either consciousness as a possibility within the scientific enterprise, first of all, is consciousness, is there a role for science and consciousness? Let me ask you that to begin with.

There clearly is a role for a science of the contents of consciousness, I think, because they are our primary interface the reality, what you are never conscious of directly or indirectly might as well not exist. Now, a science of consciousness in the sense of trying to reduce consciousness, trying to explain consciousness in terms of something else that isn't consciousness itself, that I think is hopeless because we cannot play the reductive game forever. We cannot keep on reducing one thing to another forever unless we engage in circular reasoning. So at at some point we hit sort of the bottom level of reality,

and we can then explain everything else in terms of that ontological primitive that we find at the end, but we can't explain the ontological primitive itself. And that's inevitable, whatever one's theory of nature is, you have to come down to at least one ontological primitive. And I think consciousness is it. I think we can make sense of everything else in terms of consciousness, But we cannot reduce consciousness, awareness, phenomenality itself to something else. And the attempt to do that, I think, is hopeless and leads to the signs of internal contradictions that we refer to as the hard problem of consciousness, for instance.

And again, that calls back to Galileo, which I think Philip Goff, who's a past guest on the podcast as well, spoke about Galileo's error, which was, as far as I understand it, yeah, this primitive notion of the hard problem in the context of, you know, can something inside the medicine bottle ever really read what's on the outside label? And I do feel like there is an incredible gap between what we do work on in actual sort of proper scientific reasoning with instruments and so forth and reproducibility. It seems almost impossible to think, though, that we could ever reproduce or have a control group with consciousness. And that, I think, leads many people to think about maybe philosophically entertaining, but ultimately, you know, impractical sorts of experiments. I mean, are you aware of any, you know, true experiments that could shed a light, no pun intended, on consciousness as other than, you know, kind of metaphorically, the dashboard, the instrument panel of yours, et cetera, are there only Godin experiments?

Or can we actually do real law on this to goodness experiments in the physical sciences? I think we can. I think neuroscience has been showing that experimentation around awareness, phenomenality, consciousness itself is possible and it's productive to a large degree. The entire field of the neuroscience of consciousness, the notion of the neuro correlates of consciousness, is based on measurement and subjective reports, individuals who report what they are experiencing. Now, are there problems with that? Are there limitations? Surely there are. For instance, when you are basing your study on reportability,

you do not distinguish between raw consciousness or phenomenal consciousness, as we say it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, metaconsciousness or conscious metacognition, which goes on top of awareness. Metaconsciousness is what you have when in addition to experiencing, you know that you experience. Now, to report an experience, you have. have to be metaconscious of it. Otherwise, you will say, well, I'm not having that experience.

Well, in fact, you may be experiencing it. So there is that limitation. The neuroscience, neuroscientists today try to get around that with the so-called no-report paradigms, but then you get limited in all kinds of other ways. But I think it is productive to have some science around phenomenality, around consciousness. What we will not succeed, and unfortunately, that seems to be the goal for most sciences around. consciousness is to reduce consciousness to physiological brain activity to to neurometabolism the me that the very attempt to do that presupposes a certain matter physical assumption which is that well consciousness is reducible and

that the correlation between brain activity and consciousness is a causal one and that that I think is hopeless and to complement the neuroscience of consciousness I think the way to go is to have introspective investigation, which is not science. We should not add introspection to science because it will break the back of science's horse and we will lose a very, very useful horse that we should keep and protect and maintain healthy. But in addition to science, I think it would be very productive, even for the scientists who practice the science of consciousness to develop a little more sophisticated introspective awareness

to know a little bit more firsthand what it is that they are actually studying because the level of introspective naivete amongst philosophers of mind and neuroscientists of consciousness is sometimes scary. It's sorry.

Because why? Why do you say that? Well, because one is dedicating one's life to studying consciousness which can only be actually known from introspection, a first person perspective. But one is extremely naive about what that word means. So how can one study it from the outside? If one doesn't actually know what one is studying, I mean, there are attempts made by famous

neuroscientists who say that, and I quote, consciousness doesn't happen. Consciousness doesn't exist. And when you read their material, what you realize is that what they call consciousness is a kind of ethereal sense of individual subjectivity, a kind of individual eye within, a kind of soul or spirit. And that's what they explain away. Well, very good.

It's not like anybody was waiting for that kind of proof of the obvious, but they confuse that with what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness, which has nothing to do with individual identity or some kind of individual soul, it's about experience itself, phenomenality. It's a type of existence that is defined in terms of qualities

as opposed to quantities. You cannot specify or fully describe experiences on the basis of physical quantities. What is the length in centimeters of a thought? What is the weight in kilograms of an emotion? What is the color of a memory? I mean, that's where things go wrong when a otherwise famous neuroscientist makes proclamations

about the ability to reduce consciousness to nothing while in fact what he's referring to as consciousness is not it's not consciousness at all I think that is that is unfortunate and a little more introspective insight would improve and help everybody to engage in a more productive dialogue. So I think it is useful to kind of maybe for the audience to kind of state some of your positions, which I'll summarize, at least as I understand them, but please correct me if I'm wrong in the likely scenario that I'm wrong. But as far as I understand it, you are not, although you are materialistic in some sense, you don't believe that computers will ever be able to approach the conscious experience or even the thought process that humans can engage in.

Is that correct? Am I summarizing your position? I'm not a materialist. Okay. Not at all. I don't think that the foundational level of nature is material or physical or describable in terms of quantities at all. I don't think that is true.

I am very skeptical of the notion that one can build a, silicon computer and expect it to have private conscience in their life the way you and I have. Because when you talk about conscious computers, what we mean is more than just the fact that there is consciousness associated with it. What we mean is that a computer would be conscious in the same way as you and I are. In other words, a computer would have private conscious states that are accessible from the inside but not from the outside. That, I think, is a very unproductive fantasy that arises from some silly psychology because nature is telling us that what private conscious inner life looks like when observed from the outside is warm, moist,

neurochemistry. That's what it looks like. So why would the silicon computer that doesn't metabolize, doesn't burn ATP, doesn't release neurotransmitter molecules, doesn't have action potentials, well, you can imitate action potential, so that's not a good example, but doesn't have any of the rest. Why would that be what private conscious in their life looks like? It's completely arbitrary. The mistake made here is to mistake a simulation for the thing simulated. We don't make that mistake for anything else. I mean, nobody would mistake a kidney function simulation on a computer for a kidney producing urine. Nobody would expect a computer to pee on one's desk because one knows that a kidney simulation, even if accurate down to the molecular level,

is not the thing simulated. But when it comes to the patterns of mental activity in a human being, we think the simulation is the thing simulated. And that's extraordinarily naive. No, I don't think any Slicom computer will ever have private conscience in their life. Yeah, I really resonate with what you're saying. A lot of the problems that I have with things that are controversial, like predicting future climate change, neglect the fact that no simulation really is capable of capturing the complexity in a complex system, not just a complicated system, but a complex system like the weather on planet Earth, the only computer that can do that, it seems, is the Earth itself. And that's not very useful if you have, you have to build a planet-sized computer to do a simulation

of that very planet. But I do maybe push back on one thing that I think that quantum, Computers are very, very good at simulating the properties of quantum computers. You know, it's almost recursive that they can simulate Lagrangians and they can understand, they can actually quite sufficiently calculate future behaviors of, you know, to within realms of uncertainty. But that might be the only case. And that may be the only, not only the only instance of a simulation that accurately simulates something that it was intended to simulate, but that may be the only good thing, that they can do besides breaking quantum codes of some spies or something like that. But yes, I do agree.

But that's where, to be honest, it feels hopeless. I'm just a simple experimentalist. I build telescopes. We analyze a telescope data. It's highly processed. But I've had conversations with many, many, many philosophers, including the guests that I mentioned earlier. And it always comes down to this recursion of infinite turtles kind of all the way down. Whereas we kind of know consciousness when we see it.

And I guess my question to you is that, you know, if we have a, this evolutionary propensity to develop consciousness as you, I believe, but always correct me if I'm wrong, Bernardo, because I may have gotten this wrong, you know, in all the preparation I was doing. But I believe that you believe that evolution, you know, has kind of provided a mechanism by which the experience of consciousness that we perceive has taken place. And I know that Donald Hoffman has this desktop interface modality in which he has an analogy for how we perceive it. But both of those are kind of driven by evolutionary mandates. But I wonder, isn't there kind of a disconnect? Because we don't see animals conscious in exactly the same way. Even though they've been evolving, we have 50,000 generations of certain E. coli strands. they don't seem to exhibit consciousness as far as we can tell,

or is that just a bias that I have as a human being, that my consciousness is better than an electron's pan-psychic consciousness. Am I wrong? Shouldn't we expect to see if evolution really does drive, bias are only one species of one primate, of all the different primates of all the millions of species, why are there only one that exhibits plausible notion of what we call consciousness? Okay, there's a lot to unpack here.

Yeah, sorry. So I'll take various departing points. Take your time. If you study microscopic life closely, I think you would be amazed how many signs of private conscious in their life single cellular organisms manifest. You can watch amoeba single-celled organisms, building little vases, little houses,

out of mud particles they pick from the bottom. of the puddle where they live. And then they enter it and they live in there. You can watch Paramecium go after food and navigate what is essentially a labyrinth, going after food, running away from threats. It is baffling if you observe carefully how many signs of conscience in their life, essentially all life manifests. And they all metabolize like we do.

They all do protein, folding, transcription, ATP burning. ATP burning, not all of them, but they share many of the fundamental traits of life that we have. So I would dispute the premise of your question that only highly evolved animals like maybe, you know, primates and pachyderms and cetaceans exhibit signs of conscious in their life. many animals, for instance, Corvidians, they express sorrow. They do little rituals around their fallen comrades. I live with three cats. I have had animals all my life.

There's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that they have conscious in their life. Now, I don't think consciousness itself has evolved. I think consciousness as an ontological cat as a type of existence is where it all begins from. It's what is there from the get-go. So it didn't evolve. I think what evolved are dissociated complexes

of a field of raw phenomenal consciousness that spans the entirety of nature. And what those dissociated complexes look like is what we call biology, is what we call life. And then the inner mental complexity of these dissociated processes, processes that evolved as well and they and and these organisms evolved over time higher level mental functions that were not there in nature in the beginning for instance what we just talked about metacognition self-awareness these are things that have evolved within life within dissociated complexes of primary consciousness so to say but consciousness as an ontological category was there from the beginning and there i am with professor donald Hoffman we we both think that that consciousness was there from the beginning, but the contents of consciousness

or the specific configuration of consciousness that has evolved over time because of no fitness criteria entailed by our ecosystem. How could you distinguish that type of collective behavior as, you know, physicist Philip Anderson said more is different? He didn't say necessarily that, you know, more is better, more is worse. He said it's different. In other words, the collective behavior of a pile of grains of sand is very different than 100 million times one grain of sand's behavior. We have emergent phenomena that comes up.

Again, I mean, to push back, I mean, couldn't you say then that sand grains are conscious? I mean, in the pan-psychic sense, it seems to me that there could be, well, when they get too heavy and they have too much, you know, at risk to the sand grain colony,

I'm just making this up, please humor me. Then they collapse, and that's, you know, that's good for the, you know, it's like a colony of bees collapsing because sometimes you need to have a new genetic strand that kills off the bat. Anyway, I'm making all this up. But, but, I mean, who are we, aren't we applying a selective filter to the definition of consciousness that's not necessarily, you know, intrinsic to it? You know, the famous, the map is not the territory. I hate that phrase because I have a, I actually have some territory that's a map. And I say the map is the territory. I'm just kidding. But, but, but, but, but. But, you know, could you not say the similar things, although much, much weaker, about grains of sand, you know, even, you know, eukaryotic life forms,

and perhaps electrons themselves? I mean, this is getting into panpsychism. So maybe you could say something about your thoughts on panpsychism. Contrary to living organisms that do manifest behaviors that are very suggestive of their being correlated with conscience in their life, I don't think grains of sand manifest any behavior that would suggest that they are conscious. You alluded to Anderson, and more is different. I don't think Anderson was defending some kind of, how to say, strong emergence.

I think what he was highlighting is that there may be organizing, fundamental organizing principles in nature that kick in only when systems pass a certain threshold of complexity, because why would all the laws of physics manifest only at the microscopic level? There may be organizing principles that kick in at higher levels, and there is some suggestive evidence in science that certain behaviors of nature cannot be reduced to first principles at the microscopic level. So that's how I would interpret that, but I wouldn't interpret that at all as a defense of consciousness as some kind of strongly immersed, property because I don't think that's there at all.

Regarding panpsychism, I am very critical of it. You see, I think there are many errors they make, but one way to frame the error is to confuse the structure of what is perceived for the structure of the perceiver. I'll repeat it, so it sinks in. Panpsychists confuse the structure of what is perceived with the structure of the perceiver. and the thought goes like this.

If I look at an organism, it's made of parts. It's made of cells. Those cells are made of molecules. And I, as the observer, I have a body like that, also made of cells. Therefore, my mind should be made of parts and should be constituted of some kind of microscopic sea of consciousnesses that come together in my brain. Well, that is mistaken, the structure of what is perceived for the structure. of the perceiver. I think there are many reasons why pen-psychism is untenable. One is logical. You cannot have a explicit and logical account for how micro-level subjectivities can

combine to form a higher-level, seemingly unitary subjectivity, such as my inner life of your inner life. Another reason, and you're a physicist that will come closer to home for you, I think panpsychism is physically incoherent because panpsychists take elementary subatomic particles to be little beads. And we have known since at least Feynman in the 40s and quantum electrodynamics, that's not what elementary subatomic particles are.

They can't be like that. Otherwise, we cannot account for quantum fluctuations. There are so many things. we cannot account even for the interactions of particles, because particle interactions are not given to us by quantum theory. They are given to us only by quantum field theory. And under quantum field theory, particles are ripples of quantum fields, which are themselves spatially unbound and span the whole of nature.

So penpsychism assumes that particles are little beads, while we have known, I believe, since the 1920s, I know some physicists would say, no, no, no, you're full of shit that since the 1940s, don't take away this prize from Feynman. Fine. Since the 1940s, we have known that that's not what particles are. So, yeah, no, it's a hopeless. It's a hopeless. Yeah, I agree. And so those who say that the hard problem is really a superposition of many easier problems, which maybe you were hinting at some level, just the filtration effect, what do you make of those claims?

You know, Dennett and others have said that, you know, the hard problem, it's really, just a bunch of, you know, it's like the strong anthropic principle, maybe that's just a bunch of weak anthropic principles superimposed. What do you make of Dennett's claim that the hard problem, it's really not, it's a misnomer. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot.

Loss supplies last. Pricing valid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. What Dennett tries to do is fundamentally incoherent because he never closes his line of argument. He acknowledges that. So let's not blame him for that.

He's the first one to say, yes, I haven't closed my line of argument. But if we pay attention to how. how his argument unfolds, what he does is he's saying, many of the contents of consciousness actually do not correspond to objective states of affairs in the world. In other words, we have illusions. We mistake things for other things. We think we are experiencing certain things that exist out there,

and it turns out our experiences were illusory. Those things were not out there. Now, if we extrapolate that line of arguments, and we even grant that for the sake of argument, let's say that everything is an illusion. Let's say that all of our experiences do not correspond to objective states of affairs in the world, that our entire lives, everything we take to be true is in fact an illusion that we are fooling ourselves. Does that prove that consciousness is not there? or does that prove that consciousness is everything?

Because illusions are experienced. There is nothing to an illusion by definition other than the experience of it because that experience doesn't correspond to objective states of affairs in the world. So all you have is the experience. That's what an illusion is. It's a pure experience.

So by arguing that all the contents of consciousness are illusory, what we are actually saying is that always in consciousness and only in consciousness, we will never manage to pull out of this argument like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, that there is no consciousness, because consciousness is that within which all those illusions unfold. So, no, the Dennett's attempt is fundamentally flawed and has been so since at least 1991. one. Now, another person who hasn't conceded any ground, at least to my knowledge, to your criticisms of her work, is a past guest in front of the show Sabina Hasenfelder. Many of her channel audiences subscribes to this channel, and they're probably listening right now. So you wrote

an article back in earlier this year called The Fantasy Behind Sabina Hasenfelder's Super Determinism. And then you had a debate with my good friend, Kurt Jiamengel, as the mediator, moderator, however you want to call it. I personally think debates are almost pointless, but because very few people come away, changed from their original perspective. They get reified and more sunk cost into their original philosophy. But first, would you mind describing the notion of superdeterminism and perhaps steel manning or in this case steel womaning, Sabina's position and why she believes what she believes, what's accurate about that, and then why you guys have this continuing kind of friendly, but dispute nonetheless. So first of all, what is superdeterminism in your mind?

What does it mean to you? What's wrong with it? And then what's right about Sabina's interpretation as a steel womaning attempt? Yeah. A lot there. I was still woman it because a lot of people do present superdeterminism in a way. that is not what Sabine is trying to get to put forward. Some people confuse superdeterminism, for instance,

with an argument against free will. And that goes way further than it needs to go for super determinism to make some sense. The claim is the following. In experiments with entangled particles, we know statistically now, this has won the Nobel Prize in physics this year, after 40 years of experimental confirmation,

we know that the physical purpose, properties that we measure on a particle, the properties that define what the particle is, the properties that define physicality, such as angular momentum, which is a popular one in this kind of experiments, those properties are a function of the experimental setup. In other words, what you see about a particle depends on what you choose to measure about another particle entangled with the first one. So the particles don't seem to have a priori physical properties. Their physical properties seem to arise from measurement.

And it seems to be that the act of measurement is what brings physicality into existence, which I think is correct, by the way. Now, in an attempt to try to save physicality, to say, no, no, there were physical particles there before. If you say that, then you have to explain why everything unfolds as if the act of measurement determine the physical properties. And the way to go about it in superdeterminism is to say that there are hidden variables in the particles and the detectors that establish a causal chain in the act of measurement whereby the setup of the measurement apparatus causally changes the particle in a non-local way or even, yeah, it would have to be a non-local way. Now, why do I think this is baloney?

Why do I think this is a fantasy for a number of reasons? One of them is to try to bring the assumptions that have to be made at a microscopic level, microscopic level, try to bring them into a level that we can relate to with our intuition. What superdeterminism requires is equivalent to the following. Suppose you take your camera and you want to photograph the moon at night, and then you set your aperture and you set your exposure time in your camera and point the camera to the moon and you photograph it. What super determinism would say in this analogy is that what the moon is, the physical properties of the moon,

such as its perimeter, its mass, whatever, are a function of the aperture and the exposure time in your camera. So if you would set your camera differently to a different aperture, a different exposure time, then the moon would be different. That's what is required. I think that is not intuitive. It's a rather extraordinary hypothesis. But to make it worse, there isn't even the beginning of a theoretical account of what the necessary hidden variables might be. Zabine and nobody else is telling us what the hidden variables. are. And that's the core of physics. I mean, that's how physics is done. When Peter Higgs

first proposed the Higgs boson back in the 60s, he gave us a full, well, a fairly complete characterization. He told us, I expected to be found in this energy range. I expect it to decay in this and this particles because nobody has ever measured the Higgs directly. It decays before you, before it interacts with any measurement surface. So you have to know what it decays into in order to reconstruct the event and be able to say there was a Higgs in there. He also told us coherently how the Higgs bosom plays its role, how it leads to inertia. In other words, to mass by means of the Higgs field,

that sticky field that prevents things from moving at the speed of light all the time. So we had a complete map of what to look for when we started looking for it back in 1994, and I know because I was there, when the Atlas experiment was proposed and approved, we knew what we were looking for. We knew where to look and how to look. But there is no such a thing for the hidden variables of superdeterminism. They are just a placeholder.

And as such, an expression of faith. The faith is there has to be something God knows what, that does God knows how, what needs to be done for us to be able to hold on to our prejudice that physical entities have standalone existence and they're not epiphenomenal. I don't think that's good science. And in that debate, Zabina told to my face

that she had determined what the hidden variables are, that she had published a paper saying what the hidden variables are. And when I looked at the paper, it was a toy model. In other words, those were the hidden variables of a fantasy universe, not hidden variables that are plausible or tenable in any way in this universe. So no, the hidden variables are just a placeholder for fantasies and wishful thinking as of this time. And to her credit, she did propose one experiment that in principle doesn't need the hidden variables to be determined in advance.

It doesn't matter what they are. The experiment could produce a relevant outcome either way. The problem is, and I don't know how much detail you want to get here, that experiment is non-falsifiable. In other words, because we don't know what the hidden variables are, once the experiment produces an negative result, you can

always say, well, it just is not accurate enough. We didn't repeat the measurement fast enough to account for entropy or anything else. So it's to never be a conclusive experiment because it cannot falsify

the hypothesis that motivated it to begin with. So I don't think that's productive either. When I have talked with others in the past, including Chalmers and Philip Gough, you know, I've proposed this notion of kind of the Drake equation for determining consciousness. But, of course, with the Drake equation, it's not really an equation, so some kind of parameterization, perhaps, but the biggest, you know, claim to fame that it has is it's very well known. It's very frequently described. And I think, you know, there's sort of, you know, a necessity for that to have to both clearly understand that we apply a filter, no matter what we're doing as measuring

devices or as entities. We are applying our prejudices, our biases, et cetera, that we have to be on guard against. And I think, you know, most people don't really think about it in those notions that when we say the Drake equation, I mean, we're not looking at, well, there could be life, you know, in 19 dimensions, you know, that doesn't appear in the product of terms, right? So there's always a, you know, kind of hidden assumptions that go into it, maybe not hidden in the sense of hidden variables necessarily. But I think it is important to realize that we have these biases.

And I wonder, you know, I always say with the Drake equation, it's sort of, you know, not even, again, it's not even wrong, it's not even an equation. But the most important parts of it, to whatever extent, it's useful, would be the error analysis. like you as a scientist, you and you and I, we know we don't just quote the average of something, some number of something. We quote the error bars. And it's the error bars that are much, much harder to obtain than the central value. I mean, the Higgs, you know, at the mass that you mentioned, the 125 GEV, that's not the

interesting thing. It's the errors that go into the measurement of that that are so important. So I wonder if we're not also kind of making a mistake when we think about these tests, so to speak, that, you know, we are applying our prejudices. have to be very much on guard, as Feynman said, against fooling ourselves. I think one of the easiest ways to fool ourselves is to ignore the fact that we are participating in this event itself. So you don't necessarily have to respond to that. But I'm wondering, is there a way that, is there a framework that we could address like a Drake equation? At least it's convenient,

it's popular or whatever. But is there a way that we could perhaps learn to parameterize our ignorance of what is conscious or what is not conscious? Is there some kind of framework that's mechanized or that you could recommend? Or is it really ad hoc and we kind of have to make it up as we go along? No, I don't think it's ad hoc. I think if we pay attention to nature, nature gives us the hints. I think if you look at the behavior of the different entities in nature, it's pretty clear that the ones that give us signs that we can relate to as conscious entities,

that those other entities are also conscious. consistently are entities that have what we call metabolism. Look, the variety of life is almost unimaginable. Organisms can be so comprehensively different that it's hard to find any common thing across different varieties of life. But there is one very clear common thing, which is all life metabolizes.

If you zoom in with a microscope at a sufficiently large degree of magnitude, you will see that all that semi-diversity boils down to commonality. You know, even archaea have those commonalities. By the way, we may be archaea, it turns out. But that's another, that's a whole other thing. All life has those characteristics, which are not trivial. They are incredibly complex.

They are very, very, very distinct. None of it can be considered casual. For instance, protein folding, we don't know how to solve that computationally to this day, and your body does it in like one or two seconds, and ATP burning and transcription. I mean, these are amazingly sophisticated, non-trivial things that unify our life. So I would say if we pay attention to that with an open mind, pay attention to nature with an open mind, what we have reasons to consider conscious entities, our living entities. rocks don't give us reason to think that.

Minerals in general, some would say, well, stars, if you look at, you know, the patterns of electromagnetic fields in stars, they are similar to organic brains. Maybe, but then you have to abstract away the fact that the substrate is completely different. The fact that the physical regimen is completely different. what's happening in the stars, that's plasma regimen.

That's completely different from the 37 degrees in which stuff is happening in our brains. You have to ignore size. You have to ignore so many things to make that mean, which I think, look, as you know from science, science is not about what we can prove not to be the case. Because the vast majority of things cannot be unproven. I cannot prove that there isn't a flying spaghetti monster. I cannot prove that there isn't a teapot in the orbit of Saturn right now, because maybe aliens came here in the 19th century, stole one,

and dumped it on their way back home, and got caught by Saturn. A great many silly things cannot be unproven. Of course. The important question to ask is not what we can disprove. The important question to ask is, what do we have reasons to seriously entertain as a hypothesis? And I submit to you that the only things we have a reason to seriously entertain the hypothesis that they have private conscience in their life of their own

are living things that metabolize, which excludes even viruses. Yeah, it excludes the panpsychic approach, right? So I want to reset just for people that are tuning in. We've got over 109 people that are watching live and many, many hundreds, more, thousands more watch later, talking with Dr. Bernardo Castro. He's in the Netherlands now, the lower regions of the lower regions. And it's great to have him on. I've wanted to have him on many, many times.

Thanks to Kurt Jiamengel for making the Shiduk, the introduction between the two of us. We've had many, many great guests in the past talking about different aspects of consciousness, of positivism, materialism, ranging from our earlier conversation that we mentioned, David Chalmers and Philip Goff. to more recently the conversation that we had with Nick Bostrom, and then even more recently, conversation we had with Stuart Hammeroff and Sir Roger Penrose. And I want to get your reaction to both of those. First, let's turn towards, you know, it's like you can't have a conversation as a podcaster now, Bernardo, without talking about Bitcoin or aliens, or the simulation

hypothesis. So what is the simulation hypothesis? and how do you react to it as productive or is it counterproductive to the project that you're embarking on? It depends on what people mean by it because people mean so many different things when they talk about the simulation hypothesis. I'll start with one possible meaning that I think is completely useless, downright silly, which is the notion that our physical universe and even our consciousness as conscious beings are the product of some simulation run into, in a physical computer, in some kind of meta-universe,

our universe being the result of that simulation, in some other computer, of some other civilization. Why do I think this is useless? Because it doesn't solve any problem. It just postpones the problem. It says, well, our metaphysical problem is solved because now we can say our world is just simulated. It's simulated in that meta,

universe. Yeah, but what is then the ontological nature of that meta universe? You just postpone the problem. You just moved it away without giving any solution whatsoever. And the price of moving it away is by entertaining a hypothesis for which we have precisely zero empirical evidence. None whatsoever. So you just add stuff. That's the clearest violation of Ocon's razor, of the principle of parsimony that one could think of, except for the multi-universe, anyway, I'm not getting to that. Now, is there a charitable way to interpret the simulation hypothesis in a manner that makes it useful, productive?

Yes, but if you understand it, you would probably not call it a simulation hypothesis. The interpretation would be the following. The physical world we see around us is not the world as it is in itself. It is just how the world, as it is in itself, presents itself to us. Physicality is not the thing in itself. Physicality is a representation, probably our own cognitive representation.

It's an appearance. Donald Hoffman would call it a virtual reality headset. I would call it a dashboard of instruments. Physicality is what appear on our dashboard of instruments when we make measurements on the world in order to navigate our environment. Just like the airplane's sensors make measurements of the sky outside, and the results of those measurements are displayed on the dashboard. The dashboard conveys important and accurate information

about what's going on in the world as it is in itself, in the sky outside, so much so that you can fly purely by instruments. You can land your plane safely without ever looking through the window, even if the airplane didn't have windows. The mistake we make is that we take the dashboard for the sky outside because the screen of perception is our dashboard. Our sense organs are sensors. They make measurements on the world.

Those measurements are presented to us in the form of the colors we see, the sounds we hear, the sense we smell, textures we feel, the flavors we taste. These are our dashboard dials, so to say. And they convey important and accurate information about the world if you ignore them, you will walk under a truck. So we should take the dashboard seriously, but not literally.

What we think is that the dashboard is the world, that the physical world is the world as it is in itself, even though that leads to all kinds of problems in foundations of physics and philosophy. We insist on that transposition. If you interpret the simulation hypothesis to mean that the physical world is just an appearance, then I would say, yes, that's productive,

but I wouldn't call it a simulation because a simulation seems to suggest that it is a, how to say, a premeditated thing that some intelligent organism set up just to deceive us. I don't think that's going on. That's what's going on at all. I mean, early on, you thought I was a materialist

and I corrected you. I'm not a materialist. What I am, and that's probably what misled you, I'm a reductionist and I am a naturalist. In other words, I think we should explain one thing in terms of another until we are left with only one thing in our reduction base, in terms of which we can explain everything else. And I think nature unfolds spontaneously in the naturalist sense. I think nature does what it does because it is what it is,

not because it has some kind of skewed, devious plan to deceive us. I don't think that's what's going on. I mean, did nature deceive us by making it look like the sun is in the orbit of the Earth? no we deceived ourselves it was our own stupidity the sun is the sun it's doing what it does you know it doesn't care what we think of it and so i'm a naturalist in that sense i think nature does what it does because it is what it is it's not nobody's trying to simulate or deceive but the physical world is just an appearance i think the world as it is in itself is not describable through numbers, through physical quantities.

And I would argue that by interpreting the physical world, this way you would solve so many seemingly insoluble problems in foundations of physics today. Very good. So I think what we should do now is turn to some of the slides that you've provided. I'm going to run the slideshow from my computer here, see if I can get that to work. and we have an opportunity to have questions after this as I do with all my guests I'd like to solicit questions from the audience.

And hopefully we'll be able to do that right after the slideshow begins. Let's see here. Now you're seeing the wrong screen here. I want to show a different screen. Let me move this over to here. So a reminder when you want to, you can always, you can always, You can always ask questions into the Impossible's podcast feed on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcast, Spotify, even. You can leave comments on YouTube, Twitter, where you should follow Bernardo at Bernardo Castro.

And also his website is Sensia Foundation, which is where he does so much great content, puts out so much great content. So I'm going to try to share some slides now. Let's see if this is like, good. So I've got this queued up, and you should be able to see the slides over there. There we go. And I will let us go forth. Let's see if this will work. So can you still see the screen?

Do you see it as full screen on YouTube? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Okay, great. So Sensuio Foundation, Bernadica,struefatechofoundation.org. Okay, you see it says, is physics about an external? Do you see that? Yeah.

Okay, great. So take it away. Okay, this was a presentation in which I tried to argue that physics would be easier to do and more productive, especially foundations of physics, if we did not make metaphysical assumptions and we stuck just to the data. One metaphysical assumption that is so common, most people don't even know that it's an assumption, is the assumption that the physical world is the world outside, that the world outside is exhaustively describing. through physical quantities. And that's mistaking a representation for the thing in itself, potentially. All we have is perception.

Perception is how the world presents itself to us. And physics is a science of perception. Physics asks the question, and I credit Dr. Marcus Miller for that. The question that physics asks is, what will I see next? That's the whole business of physics, is to predict what we will see next.

Now, when you go and say, those physical entities that I see and that I can characterize through numbers, they are the entities of the world out there as it is in itself, independent of my observation or my measurement, that's an enormous metaphysical assumption. And one that we can actually, in fact, dismiss,

or not dismiss, but refute. And that's the contents of the next slide. So is the first of the first? physical world out there as it is in itself what it looks like to us. That's the question. If you go to the next slide. One line of argument to say that it cannot be, was defended by Carl Friston already a few years ago. And it's based on the notion of entropy. Now he uses very complex mathematics, which is difficult to follow. He uses the notion of Markov blanket. But to summarize it in a way that everybody can understand, the argument is

the following. There is no upper bound, upper limit to the entropy of the states of the world out there. We cannot put an upper bounds to that because it doesn't depend on us. It's nature. So for all we know, there is no upper bound to the dispersion of the states of the world. If we saw the world as it is in itself, that would mean that our inner cognitive states mirror the states of the world. That's what it means to see the world as it is. Our inner cognitive states mirror the state. of the world. But then that would mean that there would be no upper bound to the dispersion of our inner cognitive states. There would be no upper bound to our internal entropy and therefore we cannot guarantee that we could maintain our structural

and dynamical integrity just merely by looking at the world. By looking at the world for all you know you could melt into hot soup but we have never seen that happen. We've never seen any living being melt into hot soup by the mere fact that it is observing the world. So no, our inner cognitive states cannot mirror the states of the world. They are encoded inferential representations thereof, which then do put an upper bound

to our internal entropy. That's one argument. And the next argument is evolutionary. We didn't evolve to see the world as it is. We evolved to see the world in whatever way helps us survive. To give you an example that Don Hoffman likes to use, when you look at a computer file on your computer or on your desktop,

you don't see the file as it actually is. The file as it actually is are millions of open or closed microscopic electronic switches. Now, if you saw the file as it actually is, that would be completely dysfunctional. You might as well throw the computer away. So you see a representation thereof in the form of a little colored rectangle on your computer desktop. That gives you accurate and actionable information about the file,

but it doesn't present the file to you as it actually is. And the same would apply for perception. Nature would never evolve a cognitive apparatus that shows us the world as it is. It would give us a dashboard of dials, just like the dashboard of dials of an airplane, that sort of summarizes and conveys, gives us a summary of what is sagliant about the world in a way that does limit entropy, like the scales of the dials are bound on both sides. and the variety of states of the dashboard is so bound that you can write an airplane manual, telling you what to do for all kinds of combinations of dial indications.

That's the physical world. It's our dashboard. We don't have a transparent windshield to see the world as it is. That would be deadly and evolutionarily that would drive us to extinction swiftly, as game theory has shown. And even our instruments don't overcome this dashboard. paradigm because we still need to perceive the output of our instruments. Everything gets filtered through the dashboard. So if you go to the next one.

In physics, there is this series of experiments. I don't need to get into details because it has won the Nobel Prize this year. So by now everybody knows what this is. These experiments show us that physical properties are a result of measurement. We cannot speak of physical entities prior to a measurement or an observation. And the experiments go roughly as follows. They can be a lot more complicated than this, like quantum erasers experiments. But in a nutshell, you produce two particles together, so they are entangled, like two photons.

And you shoot one photon to the left and one photon to the right. On the left, scientist Ellis makes a measurement of photon A after it has covered a certain distance. And on the right, scientist Bob makes a measurement on photon B after it has covered a certain difference. distance. And as it turns out, what Bob sees depends on what Alice chose to measure. In other words, the particles are not what they are prior to measurement. They acquire their physical properties. They become physical only when the moment they are measured, which takes some people for a spin. They think, well, if the particles are not physical, if there is no physicality, what is it that we measure? Woo, woo, woo, and then you go down the avenue that Carlo Raveli does, the avenue of infinite regress.

it's turtles all the way down, Raveli says its relations all the way down. If you go back to the previous slide, just for me to cover that very quickly, it's much easier to understand this if you realize that physicality is not the world as it is in itself. Physicality is the results of measurements. Just like what the dials show on the dashboard of an airplane is the result of a measurement. If the airplane sensors don't make any measurements, the dials show nothing. There's nothing on the dashboard. Does that mean that there is no world?

Of course not. The world that is measured doesn't care whether you measure it or not. It's still there. But physicality is the dashboard. So if you don't measure, yes, then the dashboard shows nothing. Without measurement, there is no physical world. The world, as it is in itself, is not describable through physical quantities. That's all the experiment is telling.

And it lines up with the argument of Carl Frithstone, the argument of Donald Hoffman. And we can go further in the next slide. We can understand why there is such a tight correlation between Alice's choice and Bob's measurement, even though Alice and Bob cannot communicate, and this experiment has excluded that possibility. The choice of measurement is made after the particles are in flight. So in the previous slide still, Brian, very quickly. How can you understand that? Well, imagine that you're watching a soccer game at home on two television screens

because you are such a big soccer fan. And you're watching them through two different broadcasters. And each broadcasters has their own cameras on the stadium. So the images will be different on the two televisions, but they will be entirely correlated. Now, if a 19th century traveler were sitting next to you, the traveler would be amazed. How do the little man running inside the box on the left?

Know how to coordinate their movements with the little man running inside the box to the right. why does your 19th century guy become confused? Because he thinks the images are the thing in itself. He thinks the football match is the image on the TV, that the little man are inside the TV. Now, we know that the TV shows images, representations. The real thing is the football stadium.

It's far away. And the images are correlated because they are both different representations of the same underlying reality. And the way we should regard this fundamental, entanglement experiments is exactly like that. Physicality is an image, just like the television screen. That's why what Bob sees correlates tightly with what Alice sees, even though they cannot communicate at all, and there is no causal link between the two, because physicality is an image. Physicality is not the soccer match, it's the television image. And the problem

disappears, but we are 21st century people seeing 21st century evidence with thinking like 19th century people that's that's where it goes wrong. So the next one. So to summarize this and I think we are close to the point where you you want to stop it, just to bring in some technical concept. Our inner cognitive states, that's a set of states that's represented by the letter R. And the world outside is another set of states,

independent of our inner states, that's represented by the letter Psi. So we interact. with the world, our inner states interact with the states of the world through some sensory states, what we perceive, and some action states, how we act in the world, nearly by existing and displacing a volume of air. Those are the A states and the sensory states are the S states, and there are these causal links across all of them, and mathematically you can model the sensory and active states as a Markov blanket, and there is a whole set of mathematical tooling that

you get when you model things this way. And I think the way we can model what's going on is to understand that the set of states sigh that constitute the world up there, the objective world, objective nature as it is in itself, those states are not physical states. Physical states are the A's and S's. The physical world is a mark of blanket that surrounds different living beings. That's why physics is relational. And there, Carlo Rovelli is right.

physics is relational because each one of us has its own physical world as this sort of layered set of Markov-Blankian state that allows us to interact with the real world. Now, we all share the real world. There is only one real world that we inhabit, and those are the states' side. But they are not physical. Physical states are relational. That's what I try to show in this slide. And if you regard the problems in foundations of physics today through these lenses, many of the seemingly impossible contradictions and seemingly soluble problems, they suddenly become

treatable. I don't claim that they are solved through this. No, no. The measurement problem is not so trivially solvable, but at least they become treatable. There is a way to think about them that is coherent. Very good. So shall we take some questions now, Bernardo? Sure, let's do it. Okay, great. Thank you very much for that. Let me go back to here. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Okay. So we have over 100 people, as I said, watching so far. There's been close to 500 people that have come in and out of the chat room.

So let's start going here. The first one has to do with, and by the way, you can always ask questions, as I said, on Twitter, Dr. Brian Keating, or on the YouTube channel itself, I solicit those before my guests come up. First one comes from Caspar Ablidge, who asked, what does Bernardo think about quantum gravity theories? Maybe I can just slightly tweak that and say, what do you think of orc or the theory that somehow the wild curvature tensor and gravitational forces cause consciousness to occur?

So these are two completely different questions. So first, orc or, I think it's false. and my criticism of it is it's not original but I think it's valid which is that consciousness seems mysterious collapse seems mysterious

oh they might have something to do with one another well I don't think nature works like this I don't think that's how we should go about theory I have great respect for Sir Roger I think the Nobel Prize in Physics last year was more than deserved he should have earned it before

but he didn't earn it for orc or. He earned it for something else. Of course. I think, I don't think consciousness causes collapse. I don't think consciousness has this magical power of changing the states of the world as it is in itself. I think the very question disappears if you regard foundations of physics through the lens. I just explained in the slides we just went through. And then the whole issue about collapse, the whole thing disappears.

And we will adopt a kind of almost a cute. approach to things. The wave function is not the world as it is. It's our knowledge of the world. It's our best betting strategy. And that's how I would regard it. Now, look quantum gravity. That's something completely else.

There I am more optimistic. You know, before it, all we had was M-theory. And M-theory, to say that it's over-determining is the, It's a, how'd say, it doesn't even approach the seriousness of the issue. And loop quantum gravity gives us at least a handle on what I think will very soon be the greatest mystery of the 21st century. Consciousness is not it. I think we have the solutions there. It's a matter of people getting used to it.

It's a matter of the prejudices slowly melting under the sun of reason like butter. It takes a while. It's not instantaneous, but it's going to happen. I think the greatest mystery of the 21st century is time, because time is discombobulating. It's obviously there, and it's obviously not there. And Luke Quantum Gravity may give us a handle on at least the beginning of a handle, beginning of a mathematically way of regard in it. So there I am more optimistic about Luke quantum gravity.

Okay, a couple more questions. here. Craig Sadler is asking, what does Dr. Kostroops have to say about the hypothesis or hypotheses like predictive coding and active inference, which mean that perception is primarily a brain-generated construct appearing in awareness? Well, that's not what those hypotheses say, because the brain is an object of perception. So for you to be coherent, you have to regard the brain as an actively inferential modality of perception. In other words, the brain cannot be taken as, cannot be taken uncritically as a thing in itself. The brain, too, as a content of perception, is differentially constructed. It's a coded representation of our cognitive system. That hypothesis does not reduce to materialism.

It does not say that the contents of perception as experiences, the quality of perception, are reducible to the brain. All that it says is that all the quality of perception, including the brains we see, including the EEG curves we measure, all of that is an encoded inferential cognitive representation produced by our cognitive system. The brain itself is one of those inferences.

So to be internally consistent with one's hypothesis, you have to apply coded inferential cognition to that very object we call brain and brain activity. Otherwise, you know, it's incoherent. Very good. Okay. So let's see. The next question. Let's see.

Let me fast forward a bunch. There's so many good questions here. Is consciousness a fractal? Is there a fractal relationship or maybe this has to do more with the brain? I don't know. You can interpret that. any way you like that I think the contents of consciousness may largely be fractal. Let me be more generic here. I don't know whether the whole of nature is fractal.

Large segments of it are and fractals have a rather uncanny applicability, even in game development. By using fractals, you can construct very convincing artificial landscapes. It sort of raises the question. Might nature not be doing the same thing? I don't know whether nature is fractal, but I would say the following, more generically. I'm a naturalist and a reductionist, so let me put the cards of my prejudices on the table up front

in an attempt to be as honest as possible. I think that the key challenge is the following. We can write the fundamental equations of physics, which is the queen of sciences. we can write all the fundamental equations of physics on half a page. In other words, and although there may be more sophisticated organizing principles that kick in at macroscopic levels, and therefore cannot be isolated under laboratory conditions, you cannot isolate, control the variables in a laboratory condition. So we may be blind to them.

They may exist, we may be blind to them. So maybe it's a full page, not half a page. but there aren't many of these organizing principles and then that's on the one hand on the other hand the universe is exquisitely complex and varied I mean the variety of phenomena between the microscopic and the macroscopic in nature

is just mind-boggling so how do you reconcile these two things how can there be so few, so simple organizing principles that lead to this massive complexity? And I think what this seems to indicate is that whether fractal or not, nature works through an iterative application of self-similar rules.

Fractylals are an instance of that. Yes. But cellular automata are another instance of that. And you can create a cellular automaton based on one or two very simple rules, and it produces magnificent complexity, magnificent variety. So because of these two observations,

the obvious complexity of nature and the obvious simplicity of nature's organizing principles, I think we will have to come to some kind of iterative, self-similar application of principles. So an iterative rule that applies itself to its own results again and again and again and again to produce the complexity of nature. And a fractal is just one possibility in that direction. Very good.

Yeah, I'll take a couple more questions here before it's getting super late over there and I have a meeting to get to. Okay. So this question comes from Anton S.H. What problem is philosophy of consciousness trying to tackle? Is it related to some prediction of the future as with science, as it is with science, or something else which we can't possibly fully verbalized. So I guess what is the, what is the, you know, really zeitgeist of this field?

Well, the key motivation, the field begun under the materialist zeitgeist, under the materialist ethos, which is that our mental life somehow should be reducible to material brain activity, and material entities have standalone existence. They are not the outcome of measurement. They are not epiphenomenal. They are the thing in itself. And our thoughts, our conscious activity, arises from that. But there has never been an explicit and sufficient account for that, not even vaguely sufficient. So philosophy of mind comes in and tries to ask the question, okay, what is consciousness then? How does it come to be? What role does it play? Is consciousness merely a witness or is it part of the causal nexus? These are all the open questions,

and they arise fundamentally, they are motivated fundamentally by this. assumption that physicality precedes phenomenality in nature, pathologically, that the phenomenal arises from the physical, which leads to all these questions. So that's the motivation for the discipline. Once it becomes commonplace and accepted that consciousness as a nontic category is fundamental, it's what there is. Everything else arises from it. Then you could argue that the very field of philosophy of mind will end. because it's asking questions for which we have answers now. We didn't explain consciousness, but we explained everything else in terms of consciousness,

which is just as good or even better. And then the field would disappear, and all there will be is the neuroscience of the contents of consciousness. That will always be relevant. Very good. Okay, last question I'll take before we wrap up and let Bernardo get some slumber. And before he gets mad at me and says, the insult that I've received from many, many Dutchmen, which is that I appear to be cluff in the molen,

cluff in the molen, does that make sense? Oh, yeah, okay, okay. Hit in the head with a windmill. Okay, so Kishkashka, Kishkastah, what is your take on Tom Campbell's theory that the universe is more virtual reality? Depends on what he means by virtual reality. I had a conversation with him some time ago,

and we agreed on a great number. of things. So I think what he calls a virtual reality is what I call the dashboard. And so he might actually be in agreement. You might be. That's great. Well, Bernardo, it's been such a treat. I want to again thank my good friend, Kurt Jemungle, who is responsible for connecting us on his channel as a model for mine. It has helped me out so much. I want to thank all the viewers. Hundreds of watch it so far. We'll rebroadcast it. We'll post it, repost it with some light editing in just a bit. And And as a reminder, you can always follow Bernardo and myself on Twitter, the two BKs that should be prominent in your mind, the Bernardo Castro at Twitter, and I'm Dr. Brian Keating at Twitter.

And don't forget to leave a comment on the video, thumbs up if you liked it, if you want to have more conversations, maybe I'll do a part two, if you'd like to see maybe just a free-for-all with Don Hoffman. I'm a serious about this, Bernard. I'd like to have you, Don Hoffman, Sabina, and also Philip Goff. But do you think that would be productive or do you think we'd kind of just devolve into a shouting? Me and thought we would just agree. All right.

You're redundant. That's right. Okay, well, we'll figure it out. Anyway, I want to thank everybody. Do subscribe to my mailing list if you want to receive a piece of real honest-to-good space schmuts. And this is actually like peanut, I think. But I do have some unconscious or maybe pan-psychic meteorite material. So that's at Brian Keating.com slash list. You can find it there. We have great interviews coming up on Tuesday. We are featuring none other than Francis Halzin, who is the Bright Professor of, he's a Belgian physicist by training, and he runs the Ice Cube experiment. And we had a wonderful conversation about the impact of new ice cube measurements, Bernardo. I don't know if you heard this on quantum gravity and constraining quantum gravity with neutrinos, which is quite fascinating. And I know you'll enjoy that.

others as well. And I just want to thank Bernardo so much for coming on the show. And again, leave a comment if you want to see that a mash-up with a bunch of scientists talking about consciousness in a debate form. Maybe we can make that happen. For now, I want to thank you all, and I want to bid you a good night and a good weekend over there. Bernardo, get some slough. It is late there, but I really appreciate this. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me, Brian. I enjoyed it a lot. Me too. Good night. Take care. And that's a wrap. Don't forget to do me a tiny free favor of leaving a small asterism, a constellation and miniature of this podcast, wherever you're listening to it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Audible, anywhere you get your podcast.

And subscribe to my mailing list, briancaddy.com slash list. So you may win a piece of a space dust if you are so lucky. And let me know what you thought of the episode. Send me feedback at Dr. Brian Keating on Twitter or Instagram. I'm now verified on Twitter. It cost me $8, but it beats the heck out of. waiting for the Twitter gods to smile upon me to bless my application with incantations and so forth. Anyway, you can find me there.

Send me email feedback. I love getting it. And I try to read everyone. I can't respond to everyone, but I can read everyone. And I do. So I really appreciate your patronage and really being supportive of me. I don't really do this podcast for the money or the fame, but it's for the really feedback that I get, giving back to the public who does pay my salary as a public employee.

But I think all scientists are obligated to do that. We'll have more to say about that in future episodes. Like the one coming soon from Francis Holtz. So subscribe to the podcast feed, leave a review, and check me out on YouTube and on my website. And for now, with that, I bid you all to have a magical rest of your week. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th. The powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on Mavato on Mavon.

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