Within Reason - #128 Bernardo Kastrup - Materialism is Complete Nonsense

Episode Date: November 2, 2025

Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch philosopher and computer scientist recognised for his contributions to consciousness studies, notably through his formulation of analytic idealism—a variant of metaphysical idealism rooted in the analytic tradition.Buy his books here.Timestamps:0:00 - What is the World Really Made Of?7:11 - Qualities vs Quantities9:45 - Can Materialism Explain Anything?25:06 - Is There More Than What We Perceive?33:57 - Can We Exist Without a Brain?42:15 - What is Personhood?48:35 - Consciousness is not the Self54:46 - Why is Mental Activity Localised?01:10:39 - Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Make Sense01:22:20 - Distinguishing Idealism and Panpsychism01:32:20 - Are There Distinctions Between Material Objects?01:39:14 - The Illusion of the Self01:46:16 - The Biggest Misunderstanding of Analytical Idealism

What do you think this microphone in front of me is made out of? I think it's made out of mental states, mind states. And the matter that we attribute to it is an extrinsic appearance and an image of mental states. Okay, quite a concise answer to what can be in this context quite a complicated question. And perhaps one that's already raised a few eyebrows. I think that if you ask the average person on the street, what is a microcontract? microphone made out of. They might tell you it's made out of metal. You ask them what metals made out of and you sort of keep going down until you get to, it's made out of atoms and you

ask what's an atom made out of, well, it's made out of, you know, electrons and what's an electron made out of? And they kind of begin to struggle a little bit. And this is an idea that I've been interested in recently and there's this growing popularity in the suggestion that once we get down to the foundation of reality, we're talking about something like consciousness or mind. I've been talking about that in the context of panpsychism. You have a few choice words for panpsychism, which hopefully we can get into and we can critique it. But I think they kind of come from the same kind of starting point, which is that this assumption of materialism, that everything is kind of made up of stuff like, you know, inert atoms that bump into each other, is somehow mistaken. Bearing in mind that probably the majority of people who are listening are materialists, I would assume, how do you begin getting?

into a discussion about what the world is really made of and trying to argue that materialism is false? Well, we need to get out some of the false implications that people usually derive, if I say that a microphone is made of mental state. I'm not denying metal. I'm not denying what appears to perception and measurement as matter as atoms. These things are empirically verified. We can measure this stuff.

There is something out there that goes by the name of atom and metal and aluminum and so for. None of that is denied. I'm not denying that there is an external world beyond my mind. What I'm saying is that these external world beyond my mind, just like my mind, is also made of mental states. And just as my mental states appear to you as matter, my brain, the atoms of my body, you know, very measurable, very physical stuff, so the mental states that constitute the external world appear to me as matter, part of which is this microphone made of mental states in front of you. So we have to avoid this cultural, culture induced wrong implications and false dichotomy and start by saying what we are not denying. So people don't run away with an

assumption that is false. And then explain what we do mean. So the real world, so to speak, is out there. Some people think that if you think that everything's made up of mind, that kind of the microphone is like just an idea in my head or that I've somehow created it by my imagination, a bit like a dream that I'm having right now. But that's not what you're getting at, right? It's not what I'm saying. What you are describing is either solipsism or a version of subjective idealism, a la Barclay, who said, to be is to be perceived. So things exist only so far as they are perceived. I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is that, yes, there is a world out there, independent of my mind, a world that does what it does, and would still do it even if I were not here to perceive it, even if there were nobody here to perceive it. But that world, too, is just like me, is made of mental states. And when there is a perceiver, those mental states appear to the perceiver, according to the qualities that we describe as physicality, like extension, texture, temperature, weight, and so forth. So what's wrong with saying that, okay, I agree that there's a world

outside of my own mental perceptions, but that world is just a physical world. And all there is is physicality, things like mass, charge, extension, texture, those kinds of things. If you just add those up together, you get a complete description of everything. in the world, with the exception maybe of conscious states like in human beings, but this microphone is just made out of physical material. What's wrong with that? Well, it leads to all kinds of insoluble problems and significant implications that we don't need to deal with if this story is not true. Let me give you an example. If you say that, yes, all this physical stuff that we

measure is the fundamental layer of reality. And there is nothing else that it is, how it appears to me. Basically, we are saying then that the numina are the phenomena, the thing in itself is its appearance to observation. If we say that, we are saying that the world is made of non-conscious stuff, fundamentally non-conscious, because consciousness is precisely the idea that there is something it is like to be the world, beyond my own perception of it.

There is another ontological ground beyond how things appear to me. There is this thing as what something is in and for itself. If we eliminate that, then we have to reduce consciousness to fundamentally unconscious stuff, which nobody has managed to do, and I would claim it has been proven to be even an incoherent thing to try. It's wrong in principle. It's like saying, how do you reduce the number five to a marital status? something illogical like this. It leads to also

unfortunate psychological implications, the most important of which is that if consciousness is just some kind of epithenomenal, if mentation is an epiphenomenal of fundamentally non-mental stuff that exist only so far as the stuff I can measure about it, then we are oddities in the universe. We don't really belong here. we are a peculiar accident that's coming to an end,

our consciousness, if it is an epiphenomeno of particular configurations of matter, when those configurations cease to exist, like when my body decomposes and loses its structural and dynamic integrity, then my consciousness ends, and everything that it is like to be me comes to an end. And therefore, I'm already dead. I just don't know it yet. Everything is ultimately for nothing.

All of these implications arise from this seemingly small step of saying, well, if we are all acknowledging that there is an external world, it is not a big deal to say, then it is just what it seems to be. In other words, it's just what I can measure. It's just what I perceive. And there is no inner world to it. There is no inner being to it. It seems like a small step, but it is a gigantic, not only logically and empirically unjustified, but a gigantic step as far as human psychology and culture are concerned. And it's unfortunate. Can you talk to me about the difference between qualities and quantities and why that's relevant here and what it says about the materialist hypothesis?

Quantities are descriptions. If I take this bottle of water and I put a tape measure next to it and I say, well, this is 45 centimeters long. That's a description of my experience of seeing the water bottle. If you tell me it's 45 centimeters, I'll have an idea of what we expect. if I were to perceive it. If you tell me it's 45 kilometers, then I have a very different expectation of what I would experience when I perceived it. So quantities, the entire stuff that constitutes

the substance of science, are descriptions. Qualities are the thing described. Qualities are the stuff that appears on the screen of perception. The stuff we are acquainted with before we take a tape measure to it. I know that there are qualities associated with this water bottle, I feel its weight, I feel its texture, I see the quality of its colors, the silver, the white, the black, the patterns of pigment on it. These are qualities. Qualities are experiential states, what it feels like to perceive, to feel, to do, and so forth. quantities are descriptions of what appears on the screen of perception, which of course is eminently

qualitative. Everything on the screen of perception is qualitative. Colors, textures, sounds, melodies, aromas, flavors, and so forth. All of it is qualitative. Quantities are how we describe the stuff that appears on the screen of perception. Now, what is cruel about our cultural situation is that even though we all start from qualities, you know, 300,000 years ago when almost Sapiens took the first step, well, maybe a little longer than that, all we had were qualities. And then at some point, a couple of 100 years ago,

we started, we discovered it was very useful to describe these qualities through quantities. And now we think all there is are quantities. And qualities are somehow epiphenomenal, as sort of a magic trick conjured up by the meat inside your skull. It's a peculiar cultural evolution. And if you really contemplate it along its historical axes, it is incredibly nonsense called Future Generations

will have a good laugh at us, at our expense. I have no doubt. You expound upon this criticism in, I mean, two of your books, why materialism is baloney and also analytic idealism in a nutshell. Analytic idealism is the name of your worldview. And you press this point, I think, quite powerfully, that once explained seems actually a little bit obvious that, yeah, we've sort of described the world in terms of mathematical formulations, it's weight, it's extension, it's length, that kind of stuff, but the thing in itself has to proceed the evaluation and description of and prediction about the behaviors of the thing. The thing itself has to exist in the first place. And you've compared this before to going like hiking in the mountains and using a map. and being like, you know, you experience the mountains and you've tried to describe very accurately the topography of the mountain range on this piece of paper, which you call a map, and then somehow people have begun to think that instead of the map being, you know, emergent of the mountain, you had the mountain and then you made the map out of it, that somehow the mountain sort of mysteriously comes out of the map, but that the map is the only thing we have and that the mountain is just

emergent from this descriptive thing that we came up with, like, what, like 10 years ago? And not only that, you're doing it while you're stood on top of a mountain. Exactly. And we are stood in the face of perception. We experience things as qualia, as the philosophers call it. You know, we experience colours and smells and tastes. And it's a complete mystery why it is that if I, you know, if I look at a blue light, it produces the feeling of seeing blue instead of the feeling of tasting a hamburger or something.

And all we do is we just know that, well, when that happens, this experience happens. We know that they correlate. But the question we need to answer is like, why? Why do they come together? And the materialist just sort of doesn't have, doesn't sort of move the dial there at all? Like, does materialism have anything going for it? I don't think materialism has anything at all going for it. I think it is an artifact of a social-political dynamics that unfolded a few hundred years ago, three, four hundred years ago.

It doesn't do anything for us. It has zero explanatory power because all we have, as far as pre-theoretical data is concerned, are qualitative states. Well, materialism doesn't explain a single qualitative state. So it doesn't explain anything pre-theoretical. It only explains its own assumptions in a circular way. Contradicts empirical evidence emerging from foundations of physics, from the neuroscience of consciousness. It is circular. I think it is logically inconsistent.

It is incoherent with an overall model of what's going on. So, no, I don't think it does anything for us. It's a bad habit of thought that arose out of social political motivations. the church was in Europe four or five hundred years ago the most powerful institution and it would repress anybody who threatened its power and it's a peculiar form of power because here we have an institution that dominated the European continent for a thousand years and didn't have an army except perhaps for a couple of hundred years of the Templars but they were an army meant to fight other people elsewhere,

not to enforce the rule of the church. So that power was entirely based on ideas, expectations, theories, beliefs. And it was important for early science to carve out a space in society for it to exist without being burned at the stake like Bruno was in 1600. So it made sense then as a social political move, to say, well, there is this other realm physies or physics that is separate from psyche or soul, mind, consciousness, spirit, whatever you want to call it. The original word, Greek was psyche. And therefore, if we do physics, we are not threatening the church, and the church doesn't burn us at this stake.

The problem is that around the 19th century, middle of the 19th century, we started actually believing this. the founders of the Enlightenment didn't believe that Didero was a very clear eye that materialism didn't work. It was a tool against the church. But by the time Nietzsche was running around writing, we actually believed that stuff. And to this day, it's changing,

but we still believe this stuff that it just doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. It just leads us to insoluble problems and incoherences. I think what you're saying is true. And I also just want to clarify for people listening. We're kind of talking about consciousness and mental states. This isn't just a view that materialism doesn't account for like consciousness or like the brain and the brain's production of emotions and stuff. This is a view that materialism doesn't explain anything, like not one thing whatsoever. Because what materialism does is it describes. And my favorite example of this is Isaac Newton himself, who sort of realizes that the same thing that causes, you know, like an apple to fall to the ground is the same thing that keeps planets in orbit around each other. He realizes

it's like the same thing going on. So he's like, oh, this is sort of universal force that we call gravity. And he perfectly, you know, mathematically describes it, inverse square law, all of this, writes the Principia Mathematica, absolute brilliant work of Undisputed Genius. And in the Scolium to the second edition, he writes explicitly, as for what this gravity thing is, as for like why it does this, I've got absolute, I've got no idea. Like, who knows? I don't know why it's doing it. All I'm doing is just describing the relations between things. And so to say that materialism doesn't explain anything, I think isn't to like insult it exactly. It's just to point out a category mistake. Materialism can't explain. It only ever describes. It describes. It

describes quantities. It describes extension. It describes weight. It describes distance. It describes all that kind of stuff. Behaviors. But if you ask a physicist, even a physicist, like what actually is an electron, what actually is, you know, a quark made out of? They'll only ever be able to tell you what it does. They'll tell you something about its charge or something about its mass, which is also determined, defined in terms of what it does. So we've got this kind of problem here, right, that this modern, common scientific idea that materialism will save the world and explain everything kind of doesn't explain anything. So there's like a bit of a problem, like a gap going on in our thinking? I think I would disagree with you when you said it's not a problem

that materialism doesn't explain anything. I have the following idea. I know some people don't agree with what I'm about to say, but to me it's self-evident. Materialism is a math of physics. It's a statement about what nature is and isn't. It's the statement that nature is what we can measure and it isn't fundamentally mental in any way whatsoever. Whatever it is, it is not mental. This is a metaphysical statement. It's a statement about being. Metaphysics, that which stands behind physics, that which is as opposed to what behaves. Materialism is a metaphysics. Science is, in principle, metaphysically agnostic, you can do a whole of science without having a single metaphysical conclusion or assumption. You don't need to know what things are. You only need

to describe how they behave. In other words, science is the activity of predicting what nature would do next. Science cannot, methodologically speaking, make any statement about what nature is. It's not equipped to do so as a method. Science is an observation of the regularities of nature's behavior, the modeling of those regularities, and on the basis of this model, the prediction of what nature would do next. So science is perfectly okay to not explain the what and the whys in terms of what things are and why they do what they do. That's not for science. Science is about what will happen next. What are we going to see next? that's what the method, the scientific method, allows us to do.

So it's legitimate that science doesn't say what things are. It doesn't need to. It can't. And that's not what its value is all about. Its value is about predicting behavior. But materialism is not science. Materialism is a metaphysics. And as such, it is a statement about what things are.

If that statement is internally inconsistent, incoherent, has no expression. planetary power and defies empirical evidence, then it's just bad, bad metaphysics. We should have another one. Well, a few questions come to mind, which, you know, I think I know the answer too, but I'd love to hear what you think about this. People will say, okay, yeah, sure, science does make predictions, right? Like, one of the great things about science is that we now know that if we lob an object at a particular velocity, we can predict exactly where it's going to land and we can send rockets to the moon and stuff. But the reason we can make, predictions is because we've come up with theories, right? The reason I can predict that a rocket

with this much thrust will sort of, you know, reach the planet Jupiter or whatever is because we've developed a theory of, I don't know, rocket propulsion or whatever, and a theory of gravity and a theory of how electricity works that allows us to run the electronics and all this kind of stuff. And those theories, as well as predicting, you know, what's going to happen, they also explain why it's doing it, right? The rocket is flying because of gravity and sort of the way that it interacts with the thrust of the rocket. You know, gravity pulls it down, the thrust goes upwards, and that's a perfect explanation as to as to why the rocket is lifting, right? Oh, science can give you the wise of behavior in the

sense of elaborating on the causal chains that have led to certain behaviors and even predicting future behaviors. But when we think that science is making metaphysical statements, for instance, the world is made of atoms and atoms have neutrons and protons and the nucleus and electrons in the orbitals. We tend to think that it is intrinsic to the scientific method to discover what things actually are. But it is not the entire history of science

is the history of the betterment of our convenient fictions. Science does not need to pin down what things are. It only needs to come up with a convenient fiction that is such that the world behaves as though that convenient fiction were true. It gives us a sort of a handle on how to think about things, but those convenient fictions do not need to be true. Even if they are false, they still have great value. I'll give you two historical examples. You're talking about Newton. So Newton's convenient fiction was that there was this invisible, force that acted at a distance without contact and instantaneously pulling celestial bodies

to one another. The French couldn't take this seriously for 50 years. They thought it was some magical woo-woo, instantaneous acting forces at a distance without contact. What the hell was that? So the force of gravity was a convenient fiction. Whether it was true or not, doesn't matter. We put a man on the moon using that convenient fiction.

It's a way to think about what's going on. We imagine that there is this magical force that acts at a distance. Needless to say, Einstein came around with general relativity, and today we go, there is no such a force. What passes for gravity is just a curvature of space time. Matter deforms space time, shifts the axis of time towards the center of something, and that becomes your future. That's why you fall, because your future points to the center of the earth.

That's why you fall. Oh, that's a new convenient fiction. The space-time is a fabric that bends and twists that you can actually deform. And then comes around look quantum gravity. Oh, there is even time. Gravity is just sort of an emergent thing out of microscopic abstract quantum patterns and processes going on. So our convenient fictions change all the time. That's perfectly all right.

the world behaves as though convenient fiction A were true until we measure better and we look closer. Oh, convenient fiction A is now not good enough. We come up with convenient fiction B. And then we evolve, we measure more, more precision, more measurements,

more observations. Oh, B is also not good enough. Convenient fiction C. You can do the entirety of science with convenient fictions. Atoms are convenient fictions. We reduce atoms to so-called subatomic particles

and those subatomic particles are reduced to the excitations of quantum fields and we imagine that there are 17 of them plus gravity. What is a quantum field? Nobody can tell you what it is because it's defined in terms of how it behaves. In other words, it's a convenient fiction. It helps us to imagine the universe

as a stack of 17 spatially unbound quantum fields, some of which interact with others, some of which hardly interact with anything else. It helps us think of things this way. It doesn't mean that there is a thing out there called a quantum field. No, the world behaves as though there were 17 quantum fields. Eventually, we will succeed in some grand unification theory and there will be one quantum field. And even gravity will be folded into that with some arcane mathematics. and acrobatics. We will get to that. And even then, that would just be the new convenient fiction. So science is not in the business of telling us what the world is. This is a

quite a fundamental misunderstanding of what the scientific method is all about. Science is in the business of telling us what we will see next. And in the process of doing that, it helps to come up with a convenient fiction in terms of which we can think of a model that accounts for what we will see next. I mean, people will want to say, okay, I get what you're saying. Like, science realistically only tells you what things do. And fundamentally, yeah, if you ask me to describe what a quantum field is or what an electron is or something, I'll sort of tell you what it does.

But, like, that's all there is. because, you know, I look in a microscope and I can, I can observe an atom. I can look around me and I can observe a physical world. People sort of imagine that we're these sort of conscious agents who sit inside of our own heads and we've got these little like windows, you know, our eyes and our ears and little sort of sense perception all over our skin. And what we're essentially doing is just sort of like letting in information, right? And because, you know, if the world is mental, you know, I can't control the world around me like I can control my own thoughts I can think happy things and sad things but the world outside of me it impresses itself upon me right and when it does it feels

like I'm sort of you know accepting some input data so aren't we just kind of you know astronauts of the material world just sort of flying through and having access to the things around us like accurately represented to our to our minds well clearly the world. Well clearly the world impinges itself on us, right? That's the experience we call life and being in the world. But the idea that what is out there consists only of how it appears to us can be immediately contradicted by an element of the world that we are very acquainted with, and that's ourselves.

Imagine if an alien came here and looked at you. you dressed in your black t-shirt with this microphone in front of you nodding as you're nodding right now or gesticulating with your hands in the alien would say that's all there is to Alex Alex is just the set of images that I perceive there is nothing more to the reality of Alex than how Alex appears to me the gesticulation the nodding and you know the movements and the words that come out of Alex's mouth and so on and so forth Well, you would know that, if you know anything ever, you would know this, that the alien's assertion is untrue, because behind underlying and somehow imminent in what the alien sees, there is the inner life of Alex, which is the real Alex. It's the numinal Alex, as opposed to the phenomenal Alex.

It's the thing in itself as opposed to how it appears to external observation. And that is very, very, very important for Alex that Alex is not just a set of external appearances, that there is an inner life, there is an inner reality, a nominal reality to Alex. Now, take the next step. What is the appearance of Alex? You know Alex has a nominal reality,

but clearly Alex also has a phenomenal reality. You look in the mirror and you see it. What is that reality? Well, it's made of the same kinds. of atoms and fields that constitute the rest of the universe. So at least in Alex's case, atoms and fields,

all the physical stuff, is what Alex's nominal world, Alex's inner life, looks like when Alex is observed from the outside. At least in that one case, matter is the extrinsic appearance of inner mentation,

inner mental states. That's why there is this correlation. between inner experience and brain states, right? And one is the appearance of the other. Of course, they correlate. So unless you are prepared to postulate some gratuitous, completely arbitrary, discontinuating nature, we have then to at least be open to the possibility

that not only in Alex's case, but in the rest of all other cases in this universe, matter too is the extrinsic appearance of some form of qualitative, inner reality. That is the only reasonable null hypothesis here. In other words, you need argument to defend some other hypotheses because the face value situation is that my body is made of the same atoms and force fields as the rest of the universe. Clearly my body is how my mental inner life appears to outside observation. So the same should hold to the rest, uh, uh, uh, uh,

about the rest of the universe. That doesn't mean that I'm saying everything is conscious. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that all matter is the extrinsic appearance of inner mental state. Okay, so we'll slow down a little bit here. We'll try and sort of pull this apart just to make sure everybody's, everybody's following along. There is a sort of sense in which there is a me, right?

Like, this is why people have been motivated to come up with like mind, body, dualism and things like this and sort of debate it till the Calcome home because it feels like there is this thing called me, which is not quite the same thing as like, you know, my hands or physical matter and the clothes that I'm wearing and stuff. There's like this me somewhere. But just for the materialist as well, like there is some sense in which I just am this collection of atoms. You know, I just am the collection of atoms that's in my brain and my body. And it sounds like you want to say that's kind of true, but in the opposite direction. where like the materialist says you have a bunch of matter and that just somehow is the same

thing as this conscious experience. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying you are just this conscious experience, you are just this like mentality. It's just that if you look at that from the outside, it just looks like a brain. It just looks like a person. And so it's not that you have this brain activity and it's mysteriously correlated with experience. Why is this neuron firing correlated with the experience of red. You're also not saying that, well, the brain activity just like is the experience of red. It's that the brain activity is what the experience of red looks like from the outside. From the inside, it looks like red, but from the outside, it looks like a neuron firing. Something like that. Yes, exactly right. There is only ever

inner experience, except that I can have an inner experience that correlates with your inner experience. And to me, your inner experience appears as the body of Alex, with arms, legs, mouth, nose, and the movements of Alex's body. So there are only ever mental states. This is the most parsimonious hypothesis, metaphysical hypothesis there can be. Of course, we have been culturally indoctrinated into attributing intuitiveness to the notion that there is this fundamental separation between mental states. and physical states, even though all we can ever know by direct acquaintance when it comes to physical states are the qualities of physical states as they appear on the screen of perception, this stuff you see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and so forth. I am not a dualist. I think dualism

has some fundamental problems, like the interaction problem. If matter and mind are fundamentally different, then it shouldn't be possible for them to interact because they, pertain to two completely disjoint ontological domains, right? And dualism says that they are fundamentally different, but they do interact. I see that as a contradiction. And even if it is, in principle, tenable, I think dualism is unnecessary.

It's not parsimonious. It's inflationary. We don't need another kind of state beyond mental state to make sense of the world. We just have to understand that there are mental states I have direct access to. Those are my own. And mental states

I only have indirect access to mediated by the screen of perception. But the contents of my screen of perception are also mental states that represent other mental states out there to which I have no direct access. This is enough. So I wouldn't go down the avenue of dualism.

It may be a more intuitive step because of our religious history and so forth. But I don't think it's ultimately helpful. I think we should bite the bullet and sort of get our thinking going in a coherent line as opposed to sort of conceding too much. Well, you know, Descartes, when he sort of proposes his famous formulation of mind-body dualism, the idea that these are like separate substances, is motivated by the thought that these seem in principle to be separable. Like I can imagine my self-existing without my body.

I can just kind of imagine being like this sort of abstractly existing consciousness personhood somewhere in the ether with no hands, no brain, no anything. I can imagine that. I can also obviously imagine like a body that's not conscious, like a corpse or something. So at least conceptually,

these two things seem to be distinct. And if they're distinct concepts, that gives us some good reason to think that they are like distinct things, even if they happen to sort of overlap in a really serious way. So I've got to say, like, That makes sense to me as a thought, right?

I feel like I can imagine myself without a brain, and I'm a little bit confused as to whether you would be able to imagine yourself without a brain. So I just wonder what you thought about that. Oh, completely. Totally. I can imagine that. So it is conceivable, but conceivability is not sufficient to pronounce something as a viable or plausible hypothesis. Look, I acknowledge this.

there is a lazy, not rigorous, incoherent line of thought according to which his separation between mind and matter makes sense. I don't acknowledge that. But that's not what you're talking about. We are talking about disciplined reasoning guided by logic and empirical evidence.

We can do better than just go with whatever sounds more intuitive to our culturally indoctuary We can do better than that. That's what philosophy is all about. I think the reason that I ask that is because, I mean, you say that, you know, a person or at least a brain, I'm not entirely clear on this, is what like, you know, a mental state looks like from the outside. And what I'm saying is if you can imagine you existing without a brain, like in that, I'm not saying that's actually how the world really is, but just step into that possible world for a moment where you exist, but you have no brain or. or physical body of any kind. What does that look like in that possible world? You know, somebody who looks at you without the brain, if in the real world the brain is just what you look like. Yeah.

That's why I was confused as to whether you would be able to imagine such a thing because maybe you think that you just are what a sort of brain presents itself to other people. Not only can we imagine it, we can actually experience something very close to it. If you put yourself in the best sensory deprivation tank, you can buy, floatation tank, and you go into it, and it's almost perfectly dark, almost perfectly silent, and you're floating in high salinity water, so you don't have the sense of touch

either or weight, you don't have any sense of texture, there is no smell, there is no flavor. You are essentially just your endogenous inner life. There is no perceptual stimulus triggering anything in the screen of perception. So there is no matter in that state. There is only thought, emotion, imagination, fantasy, intuition, reasoning, abstraction. But there is no extension, there is no salty or sweet, there is no weight, there is no texture, there is no color, there's no melody, none of that. So that is what you're asking for.

You imagine yourself in a world that is devoid of perception. Is there anything left? Of course, it's your entire inner life. It's the things that matter most to you. Your memories, your thoughts, your opinions, your views, your imagination, your dreams, your fears, all of that is still there. Now, if somebody else were to enter that sensory deprivation chamber with a, a, a, night vision scope, that inner life of yours

would appear to that person as a humanoid body floating in salt water. So this is the most parsimonious and it's eminently coherent hypothesis about what's going on. There are only mental states.

And of course there are boundaries, how those mental states sort of cohere together to form mental complexes, this coherence of certain mental states together to form complexes, define boundaries, what is outside and inside that mental complex. Now, my body seems to form the boundaries of a mental complex I call Bernardo Castro. Because if you stick a needle in my arm, I feel it, but if you stick a needle in the arm of my chair, I don't feel it.

It's beyond that boundary. The mechanism for boundary formation, we have a very good theory. it's a good starting point for it and that's integrated information theory it tells us how mental states will sort of link together to maximize integrated information

and if you keep on linking more and more and more actually you maximize information integration by shedding off parts of your empire when the empire grows too big when the mental complex grows too big it forms fault lines you integrate more information by separating stuff from you

that stuff becomes the external world, which is not part of your complex, but impinges on your complex and therefore appears to you as what we call matter or physicality. There is a very, very parsimonious, empirically consistent thought line that leads to this. Now, the argument against it, well, but it's not intuitive to me. Well, yeah, okay, sorry. Sorry then, because philosophy is about thinking right, not thinking in a culture-bound manner. We know today, we think very arrogantly about our ancestors as having been deluded about a great many things. Let me give you an example.

Hundreds of years ago, there was this theory called a fluvium. A fluvium was supposed to be an elastic, invisible, completely transparent fluid that would connect, say, an amber bar to wheat shuff. and shaft would be attracted to the amber bar because effluvium that elastic invisible substance would pull the shaft to the amber bar. So that was an explanation for electromagnetic attraction. Of course, it couldn't explain electromagnetic repulsion. But this was a very, very serious idea,

completely coherent with the empirical evidence that amber shafts attract sorry, amber rods attract shafts. But that doesn't mean that because it was intuitive to the people then, that it is the best convenient fiction to adopt

and let alone the best metaphysics to adopt. Yeah, I think it's also worth pointing out that like, basically every view that somebody can encounter to explain consciousness will have some kind of unintuitive element to it. Like when I speak to

materialist, physicalists about consciousness views like panpsychism or idealism of any kind, they say, you know, I just sort of can't imagine that like an electron is like a mental state or has consciousness or something. And I'm like, yeah, but you know how difficult it is also to imagine that you've got a bunch of inert dead matter and if you just like arrange it in the right way you just like get, you know, the taste of Coca-Cola just by like

putting like bricks together it just it's like that's also extremely unintuitive we've just kind of forgotten how unintuitive it is because we're just like swallowed it wholesale right so so i think it's it's fair to say that intuition is is uh at best a limited guide here um but there are some questions which loom right like i find a really interesting the idea that what what what we experience is the physical world is just how mentality appears from the outside right But there is this strange problem of like personhood, right? Like there's me and there's you. And not only that, but it's not like I'm looking at this sort of singular like point.

If you appeared to me as like a point in space or even like a little orb or something, but okay, maybe that's just what Bernardo Castro looks like from the outside. But I can kind of look at my own hands. And there's a sense in which they're a part of me, but a sense in which they're kind of not. I feel like I could cut off my hand and yeah I'd feel it and it would like hurt so it's kind of part of me in that respect but it's not a part of me in that if you

cut it off and got rid of it I'd feel like you know there's less Alex O'Connor there's less of my physical body but there's not less of me in a way that I feel like if you you know lobotomized half of my brain there'd probably be less of like my personality it seems like that's kind of important to my personhood

it gets a little bit confusing like where to sort of draw this boundary in the same way like how we you could say well because you can feel it it's in some sense a part of you but like I can feel my skin right but of course over time my skin

sheds you know it becomes the dust in the air and if all of it's just kind of made up of mentality like whose mentality is that like is it a part of me is it not a part of me and when it disappears like how many of me are there and am I all across the universe you know what I mean like how do we begin sort of like approaching this question on your world view

I think you're on to something that is important. I can even make it worse. We don't feel our appendix unless it's infected, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. What about your kidneys? Is there something it is like to be your kidneys? What about your liver? Your left big toe.

You can wiggle it, but most of the times you're not conscious of your left big toe from the inside, right? look to say that everything is made of mental states is the beginning of the journey the next step in the journey is to figure out how those mental states arrange themselves in different mental complexes you can think of a complex as a graph you know graph theory in math where you have these vertices that are connected by edges depending on how information flows or how causality flows between them you can create a graph of mental states

that are sort of in a causal network, they influence one another, causally. They can influence each other's state. A graph of mental state with a causal structure is what we call a mental complex. Now, this word complex has been in psychology since the 19th century. All this stuff about graph and information theory, that's the new stuff that IAT has brought into it. but it's new instrumentation of a very old, well-understood the notion, mental complexes. Now, the boundaries of this complex are the boundaries of a sort of innate sense of identity. Because there is something it is like to be a complex, but there isn't anything it is like to be individual mental states in that complex.

For instance, I have a holistic experience of the monitor in front of me, of the feeling of, my skin touching the chair that is supporting me, the colors I see in front of me, the smell in the air, the texture of my clothes. All of that is part of one complex. There is nothing it is like for Bernardo to feel the texture of my clothes

and not be seeing in you right now. These states subsume together into an integrated state. This is all integrated information theory. The temptation is to see. say that therefore Bernardo and Alex are only one complex. But

there is no necessity here. Bernardo and Alex are sets of complexities. The complex that I identify with myself is the ego complex. But there are obviously many other complexities

in this great web that appears to the outside as my body. So for you, There are the memories we are not evoking, the feelings we repress, the traumas we forgot, the wishes we deny, you know, all this stuff that psychology in the 19th century would call the unconscious. It is not unconscious. It's unconscious from the perspective of the ego because it's a different complex. The ego has no direct access to the other complexes that are going on within. the great collective that each one of us is.

But each of those other complexes are conscious from their own perspective. There is something that is like to be them. So think of us as sort of the passengers in a bus. And the ego complex is the driver, the executive ego. It controls the body, makes choices. But there is a lot more going on in our inner mental lives, some of which sometimes appear in dreams, in your roses, when you're depressed, or in phases of great upheaval,

when we realize, oh, my God, I have been feeling like this forever. I just didn't know, right? So your left big toe, your liver, your kidneys, they are the extrinsic appearances of other complexities that your ego cannot directly access. So they do appear to the ego as matter. Or sometimes you can direct. access them because you've touched your left big big toe but there is this gray area in which

information integration is not complete as in a single right so like from the outside it looks like a big toe from the inside it feels like a big toe right and like I can I can make sense of that you've used the word ego a few times there and I want to guess that the way you're using the word ego is how religious traditions and philosophers of all kinds might use the word like self, which is not the same thing as consciousness, right? Like there's this sort of distinction between consciousness, which is just awareness of any kind, and then there's this thing called the self or the ego, which is this like unity of conscious experience into like an I and a me, right?

And a lot of religious traditions have taken this kind of realization that everything is made out of the same stuff, that we're all part of one big kind of mental field, and it's just like localizations, ripples in the waves, as it were, and that's all we are. But there's just one big ocean to say that realistically, this idea of the individuated self is an illusion, doesn't exist, or that there's only one self, and we're kind of all participating in it. I don't know if you use the word ego in the same way that they're speaking about self, but what do you think about that? And do you believe in Bernardo Castro? Do you think that, like, you exist? You know what I mean? No.

No, I don't. I don't believe in a permanent personal self. I think the evidence is overwhelming that it's not there. What we call a personal self is a narrative. It's an inner story that we mistakenly identify with. It's that person was born. they and is married to that other person and does these or that for a living in living in this address that's the narrative self what we call the personal self is a narrative the narrative

self some psychologists would call it the adaptive self it's a story in terms of which we can act in the world and defend ourselves psychologically and a whole field of psychology called ego defense mechanisms. It's how you defend against the assault of the monstrous world around us. How do you defend your personal agency and even your personal value? So it's the meaning that we attribute to this persistent personal self that is not there at all. It's a narrative that keeps changing. So I don't buy into that, but I will buy into what Jung Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, called the self with capital S. Because there is something that is obviously there.

It obviously exists. It's the only thing that obviously exists. And that is subjectivity. Subjectivity. Philosopher I Teihani called it core subjectivity, which is what's left when you get rid of all the narratives about what we are. it is that to which experience is given that which receives experience

as the subject of experience Galen Strausson said wrote once that not even a sensible Buddhist would deny that there is the subject and that experience entails a subject now we mistake what that subject is is it personal is it permanent I think all of I think the answer

to both questions is know, but that we mistake the characteristics we attribute to the subject. It doesn't mean that the subject itself is not there. It obviously is. It is the thing that is theorizing about what the subject is. It is the dative of experience, that to which experience is given. So that self obviously exists. I would go as far as to say that the most parsimonious metaphysical hypothesis that is still

coherent and empirically consistent today is that this core subject, this dative of experience, is the only thing that exists. And the myriad of different qualities of experience are just different patterns of excitation of the self. You can imagine this self with big S as the ultimate quantum field, the unified field. It's that which spans the entirety of nature and the apparent diogenes. diversity of natural state are different patterns of excitation of this oneself, just like one guitar string can produce many notes, depending on how it's excited. This one field of subjectivity that nature is can get excited in many different ways, producing discombobulatingly various patterns, practically infinite ones, and yet it's only one thing.

This is the ultimate reductive metaphysics. I am a reductionist, by the way, and I'm unashamed, extreme reductionist. I think everything, literally everything, can be reduced to one thing, and that is the non-personal self.

So, I want to ask you a question that I asked Philip Goff just last week, which is, like, why are you not a Hindu? You know, like, these guys have been saying for thousands of years that there's this one great big self called the Atman, And in many, you know, Hindu traditions, Atman is the same thing as Brahman,

which is like, you know, the ultimate reality. And that's kind of all there is and all that exists. And we all kind of participate in it. Like, is there sort of something in that view that's attractive to you? Have you sort of ever tried being a Hindu for a bit? I just, I just wonder hearing you talk like that, you know. Feels like I'm sort of reading the Upanishads or something. Well, I don't know how much baggage would come with the notion that I would try to be a Hindu.

I mean, I think what I just told you is, frankly, the only plausible metaphysical hypothesis, but there is more to being an Hindu than arriving at this conclusion I just shared with you. And I don't want to commit to all the rest because they know what all the rest is. Yeah. So, okay, so we've got this sort of, you know, great big self. And I really like how you talk about, you know, the ripples and the wave, right? It's very helpful way of thinking about it. Interestingly, I was just, just the other day I was having dinner with two people I just met.

One of them is a psychiatrist, like studying psychiatry. One of them is a physicist. And I was talking to the psychiatrist about consciousness and about, you know, panpsychism and idealism and stuff. And I can't remember exactly what I was saying. I was saying something a little bit about how consciousness is sort of like localized, like, activity of one big thing. And the physicist, she sort of cropped up and said, yeah, that's, really interesting. That's, that's a bit like how we physicists think of like electrons, you know, like in the, in the sort of, in the quantum wave field. And I was like, well, well, isn't, isn't that

interesting? Isn't, isn't that interesting how you think about it in the, in the same way as how we're talking about consciousness? And it was quite a funny moment because, yeah, there's a lot of sense to be made about this. And you're imagining this sort of great big wave, there's great big ocean, and there are ripples in the wave. And you've spoken about how like a whirlpool or a ripple in a wave is not a thing. You can't like, pick it up and take it out of the water. It is just the water. It's still localized. You can like pointed it, but it's like an excitation of this, of this ocean, but it's, it's nothing new. It's nothing separate from the ocean. But the thing is, like, yeah, like a wave is like the same thing as

the water. It's made out of the water. But there's like some kind of reason why it forms a wave. You know, oceans don't just like spontaneously start moving around, you know, those gravitational factors, earthquakes, wind, whatever, right? If all that exists is just this self, right? I can imagine that if we just all experienced reality all at once, all is one big thing, and I was experiencing the Andromeda Galaxy and your thoughts and my thoughts and somebody else's thoughts all at the same time, then cool. But we've got this individualization, right? And even if we describe it as, well, okay, it's kind of a bit of an illusion. It's all just like excitations of one big field. Why?

Like, why is there not just one big unit of experience? Why do we get this sort of localizing and excitement? Why do we get electrons cropping up of the quantum field theory? Why don't we just have one big field, you know? I sense two questions here. One is, how can the field be self-excitable without an external agency that causes and excitation. Well, this is no different for any metaphysics you get because science has the very same problem. And the way we solved it in physics is to say the quantum fields

fluctuate. They have these spontaneous fluctuations. They are self-excited. That's why there is an universe. That's how the whole thing started. There's nothing outside nature and yet here's nature doing a great many things. So it can only be through self-excitation. So that question is always there, regardless of your metaphysics. It cannot be used to differentiate one metaphysics from the other as one being more plausible or not. Self-excitation is inevitable, not only for all metaphysics, but for science as well, ultimately, why there was a big bang. Something had to fluctuate. The big bang was a very big quantum fluctuation, but quantum fluctuations are happening all the time around us. This is an empirical fact. By the way, in the vacuum, virtual particles pop in and out of

existence all the time because of this quantum foam that is always active at the base of the universe. Now, to be clear, just to interrupt briefly, when you say that virtual particles pop in and out of existence, to help people along here, are you imagining, whereas in my head, you know, traditionally I think of this big black space and it's like, bang, there it is, and whoosh, there it's gone, you would probably rather picture this as like a kind of still body of water where there's a little ripple and then the ripple goes away. Something like that.

Correct. Correct. Because if you don't imagine things, that's why a field quantum theory requires fields, because if you don't postulate that particles are not things, particles are just behaviors of the field. They are something the field does

and then stops doing. If you don't understand things this way, then you end up having to believe that stuff pops in and out of existence for no reason, which is I mean, if anything is magical thinking, then this is it, right? Nothing is more magical thinking than that. That's why we say, well, there are no particles.

We say particles as a metaphor. And because of historical reasons, there are only ripples on the lake. There is only ever the lake. The ripples are something the lake does, and it may stop doing. So nothing magically popped in and out of existence. It's just that nature was doing one thing and it stopped doing it. That's quantum fluctuations. So that was the first part of your question.

Can this feud of subjectivity be self-excited? Well, obviously it is. Regardless of your metaphysics, whatever is out there is self-excited because there is nothing outside nature by the very definition of nature. The other question was about why there is a me separate from you. Why is Bernardo capable of accessing his own inner life, but not Alex's inner life? and the other way around, presumably. Well, that's just evolution.

Look, IIT gives us the beginning of a theory of how mental states join together to form complex ease or split apart because splitting apart, the formation of fault lines leads to more integrated information. It's the best theory. It's a starting point, but it's the best starting point we have. Given enough time on the surface of this planet, mental states were bound to join together in complexes that found a way to maintain themselves.

Now, why was that? Well, because once there was a complex that could maintain itself, that's the one that survived. And the ones that couldn't maintain themselves are gone. And eventually, one popped out that could spin out other complexes, reproduction. I can see that. And here we are. I kind of want to go a step back, though, because, like, I'm interested in this question of the excitation of the field in terms of just, like, say, a particle, right?

Just this one little vibration. There's this question of, like, you know, can something be self-exciting? You know, maybe there's this ocean that can produce its own waves. But there's this question of, like, why? Like, I understand if you want to say something like, look, we don't really. know, but that's not a problem for like my metaphysics. That's just a problem for metaphysics in general, right? And that, that's fine. But I just wonder if you have an idea why, because if I accept your view that there is just this one big mind, I would expect, I think, you know, it's hard to

imagine what I would expect if I was not a unified, you know, agent. But I think I would expect that there would just be sort of one big ball of experience, right? But for some reason, it just like, you know, is it like that it wants to? Can you even speak of desires, like in this sense? I'm trying to think of how to picture what's actually happening there in like your language, as it were. I get where you're going with it. So I will make a concession, but first I'll give a few disclaimers if you're okay with it. I'm a naturalist.

I think nature does what it does because it is what it is. and nature has its archetypal templates of behavior and nature's unfolding is the natural unfolding of these archetypal templates of behavior. Nature does what it does because it is what it is. So a naturalist. There is no external intervention into nature from some kind of individuated force standing outside nature

that wouldn't be naturalism. So I'm a committed naturalist. I also guard against anthropomorphizing things because one thing I have seen a lot amongst people who sympathize with analytic idealism and idealism in general is the temptation to say, well, if the entire universe is made of mental states just like I am, then it should behave and think and desire like I do. No, our complexities evolved.

on the surface of a rock over four billion years because of a scarcity of resources. The other mental states up there didn't undergo that process, so there is no reason to think that they would be even remotely akin to ours. The only

similarity would be that whatever their inner life is, it's also qualitative but it may not have anything else related to how we feel from within. So having made this to disclaimers, I will concede this. With just about any other metaphysics, certainly with physicalism, which is a metaphysics,

you cannot speak of why. There is no why. There is just the mechanical unfolding of nature's intrinsic regularities. And you can add a little bit of chance as the source of auto-excitation to kick-start the process. But under idealism, if it is all one great field of something, objectivity, then yes, strictly speaking, we can talk of a why. We can talk of a felt impetus to action. And we can, with a lot of caution, imagine what that felt impetus might have been like, exploring the notion that impetus was felt in a mind, and I am also a mind. And although

these are completely incommensable minds, there is a point of singularity, there is a point in which these two things are one and the same field of subjectivity. So with all these disclaimers that are just made and highlighting that what I'm about to say is speculation and that even if it is completely wrong, it does not in any way affect the plausibility of analytic idealism. Analytic idealism does not depend at all on what I'm about to say and it is a slight form of anthropomorphization

but I will entertain it what could have been the impetus to action that kickstarted all this the only thing I can imagine well there are two things I can imagine one is an irresistible desire to self-knowledge

what is it that is going on? What is it that I am? Not articulated in this way, because I articulated it in a self-reflective way, and self-reflection is the result of four billion years of painful blood evolution on this rock. So the mind of nature in its primordial state is not going to self-reflect.

Otherwise, flies an amoeba with self-reflect, and we have no empirical reason to think that they do, right? So I am saying this out of my own self-reflection, but one could imagine that there is an instinctive felt, not articulated, but felt impetus to self-knowledge. That's one possibility. Another possibility is sheer solitude, how mind-breaking sheer solitude could be. But again, this is poetic imagination. I am sort of going off to the races with poetic imagination.

that this is no longer analytic philosophy. Of course. But because the other question that it sort of raises is, okay, so you're telling me that we all kind of

exist as the result of a kind of mental activity of this great big ultimate mind which is the ground of all being and of all consciousness and in whom we sort of get our existence and it starts to sound a little bit

pantheistic. It starts to sound a little bit like you're describing something like the mind of God, right? Like when people say the world is created by an intelligent, sort of, like a creative intelligence, right, which in some sense is like kind of non-physical, but produces the physical world. And it's all a bit of a mystery. So like, oh, okay. We've now been led to this idea that the universe crops up as the result of one big mind. And do you think that it is fair to characterize that as verging on a religious position? Yes, I would be dishonest if I didn't say yes to this. Only some form of extreme prejudice would have to stop one from acknowledging this.

But look, I don't know what people mean when they say God. I think there are 8 billion definitions of God out there, right? one for each person. So if I say, well, I acknowledge God. I don't know what I'm acknowledging the minds of the people who are listening to you. I'll tell you this. I don't think the God that I would imagine under analytic idealism, I don't think it is deliberate. I don't think it had a plan.

I don't think it's passing moral judgment. I don't think it is self-reflecting. I think it is doing what it is doing. Very spontaneous, spontaneously, it's simply unfolding its own mental archetypes. In a spontaneous, I'm tempted to use the word automatic, but that goes too far in a regular, predictable, spontaneous manner. Yes, it is mental stuff. Yes, it is omniscient by definition. It's the sum total of nature and its mental states. So it is seant, therefore it is omniscient. it is omnipresent because it's all there is

and it's omnipotent in the sense that everything that happens happens by virtue of its unfolding, it's doing, its behavior. So you could say the universe is God dancing and you could even say I lost my train of thought. So I'll give you that.

It comes close to religious traditions and I would be dishonest if I wouldn't acknowledge that, but I guard against all the baggage of attributions that people might make and place on analytic idealism because of this acknowledgement. I'm not talking about a God sitting in a throne and deciding the fate of man in a capricious, deliberate way. I'm talking about a spontaneous unfolding of natural prosthesis,

that happen to be mental in nature. Okay, yeah, I mean, people will be interested in the sort of parallels here, but I think you're right, it's also maybe not that interesting to get into the details of that. It's just worth sort of pointing out that that's an avenue people can explore. But speaking of views that people think sort of border on religious that come with a lot of interesting metaphysical baggage, I've talked a lot recently about the view called panpsychism that starts with a similar assumption about the nature of science and materialism

that it doesn't explain what we need it to explain. It sort of materialism and science, they like describe the world, they tell us like what an electron does, but they don't tell us what an electron is. And there's only one thing in the universe that we experience for itself, like the is-ness,

and that is experience. You know, we experience experience itself. And so, if we've got this sort of ontological gap at the bottom of physics that we don't know what stuff is ultimately made out of, we know what it does, but we don't know what it is. And in our everyday experience, there's only one thing that we know the is-ness of, and that's consciousness experience. Why don't we take that is-ness and plug up that ontological gap? And you get this view of panpsychism that there is a real world out there. You know, there's a, there's really

an airport case, right, that I'm holding in my hand. It's, it's made up of stuff. that I can touch. It's just that if you really get to grips with what it is, it's made up of like really rudimentary foundational consciousness. Some people listening to this podcast thus far might actually be under the sort of apprehension that that's kind of what you're saying. But importantly, you're not a panpsychist. It is not what I'm saying. You don't like it very much. So I was just hoping you could tell us why that's the case and what the important differences are. So there are two important questions about panpsychism. I'll name them and then I will elaborate a

a little more. One is a distinction between property and essence, and the other one is where are the boundaries of psychic complexes? So there are at least two variations of panpsychism. One would say qualia states or phenomenal states or experiential states are something that elementary subatomic particles have, just like they have mass, they have spin, they have charge, they have quali-estates. That's the property idea. And the other is the essence idea. Elementary subatomic particles are quali-states,

and the other properties are the external manifestation of the inner essence, which is qualitative. So charge, mass, momentum, and all that, spin, are the manifestations of qualitative inner essences. The latter... is the only plausible formulation of pen-psychism. The idea of phenomenal states as properties just doesn't work. Unless you ask me to, I'm not even going to spend time on that.

Because the way you prompted the question sort of assumes that we are talking about essence, not property. And the second question is, where are the boundaries of psychic complexities? Because to have qualia states means that there is something it is like to be this entity that has qualia states. What are the experiential boundaries of this entity? Under panpsychism, it will be the boundaries of elementary subatomic particles. So there is something that is like to be an electron. There is something it is like to be a moon, a quark, and so on. And these tiny microscopic consciousnesses, they come together in our nervous system, in our brain. They combine their inner lives to form the seemingly unitary inner life that I consider to be myself and that you consider

to be yourself. Now, this combination is a problem. It is as problematic as the heart problem of consciousness. There doesn't seem to be a coherent way to describe what this combination consists of, even in principle. But there are other problems. But there are other problems. with panpsychism that I think are so much more definitive and severe that we don't even need to have a discussion whether the combination problem is real,

really insoluble or not. We don't even get to that point. Pencychism, or to be more rigorous, micro-constitative panpsychism, which is what I was describing.

Pan-psychism as a word is so broad, it could even be ideal. But we are talking about micro-constitative panpsychism. It makes one assumption that is just physically incoherent. It assumes something. This is just not true. And we have known that it's not true at least since the 1940s with Richard Feynman and quantum electron dynamics, arguably since the late 20s, but I'm not going to go there

because it's polemical. and that is that elementary subatomic particles are discrete things with defined physical boundaries because that's the key assumption of the panpsychist

my thoughts are separate from yours because the little elementary particles inside my head although they touch each other and combine to form my inner life they are physically separate from the elementary subatomic particles inside yours call. And that's why they don't combine with yours.

And that's why I have access to my thoughts, but not to yours. So the whole thing, it's a sand castle built on top of this assumption that elementary subatomic particles are things and have discrete spatial boundaries. Neither of these statements is true. they are demonstrably and empirically false in physics there are no elementary subatomic particles when we call them elementary what we mean is that

they are not constituted of other types of subatomic particles a proton is or any well never mind a proton is made of quarks so a proton is not elementary a quark is elementary but that doesn't mean that the quark is irreducible, it only means that there aren't other particles inside the quark, as there

are other particles inside the proton and the neutron. In physics, and we have known this for at least 80 years, there are no particles. It's a metaphor for identifiable

patterns of excitation of an underlying quantum field. There are only quantum fields. And this is not only theory, a great many things would become unaccountable for, magical, without this notion. Let me give you at least a couple of examples. Particle decay would become magical. You know, people say we found the Higgs boson. We did, but we never measured the Higgs boson because it decays before it interacts with the measurement surface. It decays much too quickly to be measured

directly. What we measure are the particles, the Higgs boson, decays, into. like it can decay into two muons, heavy muons, for instance. But it's not made of two heavy muons. So you would have to say under this notion that particles are things with spatial boundaries, you would have to say that the Higgs boson magically disappears into nothingness, and two muons magically appear out of nothingness. That's magical thinking. That's not what's happening.

What's happening is that there is no Higgs bosom. There is an excitation of the Higgs field. that excitation decays. It's like one big ripple decays into other types of ripples. Just like ripples actually do, like waves decaying into ripples if you observe the ocean carefully enough.

So nothing magical is happening. It's just that when we talk about elementary subatomic particles, it's a metaphor, a metaphor that is perpetuated because it's so operationally useful. Feynman with quantum electrodrodynamics was the first one

to understand, well, at least that we know, to understand it that there are no particles, there are only fields. And yet he operationalized that in the form of so-called Feynman diagrams, which draw a little particles as little points and little arrows connecting them so we can see the interactions. So that perpetuated the operational usefulness of the metaphor, but to think as the panpsychist does, that the metaphor is actually literally true, is just a, basic and like bachelor

level misunderstanding of what physics is saying. There cannot be particles as things. Look, even inertia mass, you know, mass, inertial mass, the

stuff that things are made of, what is the key characteristics of what we mean by stuff? It's inertial mass. It's the fact that if a train is moving, it's very hard to stop it. And if a train is at rest, it's very hard to get it moving. That's inertial. It's

resistance to changes in the vector of movement, be it in speed or direction. The only way we explain mass, and I'm not going to be rigorous in what I'm about to say, and some physicists who say, Arbenado, come on,

but it's a pod, guys, it's a podcast. And I'm not talking to physicists. The way the Higgs boson explains inertial mass is not because it's a particle but because it is an excitation of a field

it is the Higgs field that provides the stickiness that resists changes in movement that can only be explained by the Higgs field that's the mechanism of inertia so we wouldn't be able to explain

mass to explain existence if particles were little billard balls with defined spatial boundaries. That's not what they are. This is an operational metaphor that is useful. It's much simpler to write

down a Feynman diagram than to solve the equations of QFT. That's why we keep talking about particles. There are no particles. So the very fundamental assumption of the penpsychist isn't true. There are only fields. Probably

only one, but right now in mathematically model 17, and they are spatially unbound. So if the panpsychist wants to be consistent with this approach of saying consciousness is inherent to what is ontologically irreducible, then you have to put consciousness in the field. And the field has no spatial boundaries. And therefore, the panpsychist cannot account for why your thoughts are not accessible to me. Because it's the same fields spanning this spatial location here where I am

and yours, they span the entirety of nature. They are not bound. So, panpsychist, sorry, micro-constitative panpsychism is a non-starter because it's started, starter because it's predicated on a very basic misunderstanding of physics. Yeah, so we can use the word panpsychism to describe micro-constitative panpsychism just because we can just stipulate that that's what we're talking about to save time a little bit here. Okay.

And it's an idea that I've been exploring a lot. My listeners will probably know that. But I've sort of been thinking about how best to cash it out. And I do sort of have this thought that like, well, you know, the universe is made up of smaller and smaller stuff. And maybe that really small stuff is just consciousness. But it does seem really weird that you can take a bunch of little points and sort of put them all together and get one big thing. So, like, well, maybe it's better to think of one big thing rather than lots and lots of little things, right? But you've still got this like localized excitation at the field, right?

And I suppose what I want to ask about is like, suppose I wanted to defend a version of panpsychism. And it might just be that if panpsychism becomes defensible, it just starts looking like analytic idealism. I can understand that. But let's say, you know, in the same way that the physicist talks about particles, even though what they're really talking about is an excitation in a field, they use the word particles just to sort of, you know, allow us to functionally do science, the panpsychist does the same thing in talking about these fundamental units of consciousness. What they're really talking about is excitations in this sort of big mental field. But like, there is still the excitation. And what physics calls a fundamental particle, like an electron or a quark, you know, I'm thinking that is, in some way,

I wouldn't know how to quite describe this, but that is whatever the like most rudimentary fundamental kind of vibration or excitation of the quantum field that could exist. That's kind of how I imagine what saying something is a fundamental particle means. It's just, for whatever reason, it's just the most fundamental kind of excitation that can occur. That's fair. It's the pixel of the field, yeah. Yeah. So why can't the panpsychist just say, yeah, okay, we're talking about vibrations in a field. I just think that the fundamental unit of consciousness is the most fundamental, kind of excitation of the field. The field is not conscious. It's the excitations that are

consciousness. And so those tiny little rudimentary excitations are like the particles, quote unquote, of panpsychism. And so I am kind of talking about a field still. I'm using your language. It's just like the physicist talks about particles, I'm talking about particles, but really it's just an excitation of a field. Would that still be panpsychism? And if not, like why not? No. Words are important, right? Otherwise, you know, you can say physicalism is true because all physical states are actually mental states. We just call them physical. Well, that's truth by word redefinition. That's the point where you can throw words away because they don't mean anything anymore. So assuming that this word panpsychism has differentiated meaning, then you would have to ask yourself, what are we talking about? Are we talking about a pixel of experience or are we talking about a defined subject that is fundamentally separate from other defined subjects? The latter is what panpsychism would say. It's not only a pixel on the screen of unified

experience. There are lots of pixels in the screen of my unified experience right now. I see yellows, I see whites, blacks, greens, browns. They are discernible, but there is only one subjectivity, the one subjectivity that is experiencing all this variety of qualiestates. The statement of panpsychism is not that an elementary subatomic particle is a pixel on the screen of experience, but that it is a subject, separate from other subjects. The moment you do that, then you are no longer consistent with physics. because for there to be this multitude of subjects, elementary subatomic particles have to be a multitude of things.

But they are not things. Just like a ripple on the lake is not a thing. You cannot fish it out of the lake, put it under your armpit and go home with it. The ripple is a doing of the lake. There is only ever the lake. And elementary subatomic particles in physics, quantum field theory,

the best scientific theory, ever created by mankind, by orders of magnitude. Elementary subatomic particles are ripples on the lake. They are not things. Therefore, you cannot associate separate subjectivities to each one of them. Because they're not there, just like the ripple is not there. There is only ever the lake. So if words are to be useful, we cannot massage them to a point where they no longer carry any meaning.

The reason I'm saying that, I had a discussion a couple of years ago, the very famous physicist whose name will remain unsaid, it was at 3 a.m. And it was via the internet. And after wrestling with each other for a long time, he said, Manaro, you know what? Suppose it's all mental states, like you're saying. And they are really out there. And they behave according to regularities that we can model theoretically. Why don't we just call them physical states? And that point I threw the hat.

It's like, okay, if that's how we are going to do this, you know, redefining words to mean what nobody else assumes them to mean, like I will redefine physicality as mentation. And yeah, then physicalism is true. Okay. But, I mean, we are just creating confusion here, right? We should stick to the meaning of words. Yeah. Okay, so this will help me out then, right? Like, the panpsychist thinks that there's something it's like to be an electron.

Right. You don't think that. Correct. I do not think that. But you think, but you do think that the electron, as an excitation of the wave, is like, what, like made out of mentality? I think people might be thinking, hold on, if everything is like mental or mental states, I think, as you put it, isn't kind of a definition of a mental state that there's sort of something it's like to experience that because a mental state is a kind of experience. You know what I mean? Yeah. But a kind of experience can be merged in a sort of, can be subsumed in a broader field of experience. For instance, I see many pixels right now, but they all subsume into the unified experience that I call my inner life, Bernardo's inner life, right now.

Let me give you a concrete. Let's make it concrete. There is something it is like to be my... ego complex. In other words, my default mode network, a subset of my neurons arranged in a causal structure that is active when I'm not engaged in any particular task. So the default mode network. There is something it is like to be my default mode network when I think about it right now, when I think of myself, of my inner experience right now. So there is something it is like to be those neurons in my head.

But there is nothing it is like to be one individual neuron in the default mode network, right? At least there is nothing I can access that tells me there is something it is like to be a single neuron in my head. There is only something it is like to be the entirety of my default mode network. What is a neuron then? A neuron is a segment of the image that my default mode network appears to be from outside observation. A segment of a unified image. And that segment is arbitrarily carved out by us. There is no such a thing as a neuron.

Where is the boundary of a neuron? Is it a synaptic cleft? Well, there isn't a vacuum in a synaptic cleft. It's all filled with stuff. It's just that our pattern recognition and our linguistic dictionary give us a word for a subset of that unified image that we call a neuron

and leads to the question, is there something it is like to be a neuron in and of itself. The answer is no, because there is no neuron. A neuron is not a thing. It's like taking a painting and arbitrarily carving out all the pigment points

that are roughly yellow, putting a boundary around them and saying, that's a thing. Give a name to it, X. Is there something it is like to be X? No, because there is no X. It's an arbitrary carving out of an image. Okay, so, yeah, I can see how that works

for like a neuron. Just carry on. There is nothing it's like to be this water bottle I'm holding in my hand because there is no bloody water bottle. We think that things we have a word for are actual things.

we project the structure of our language onto the ontological structure of the world, the world. That's why we get all confused. That's why the panpsychist has to answer questions. Like, if there is something that's like to be a table, suppose I remove one of the four legs. Does the leg that I now removed acquire a consciousness of its own separate from the rest of the table?

The answer is no, because there is no table. There is no table leg. There is only the inanimate universe as a whole. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I think I get what you're saying. I don't know what you're like, I don't know if you can sort of separate out your metaphysics of objects, right? But there's, luckily, we're in good company and that if I say a phrase like myriological nihilism, there's a good chance that a fair few of the people listening will actually know what that means. But is that the kind of view you're getting at? That there's no sort of real distinction between like material objects and we're just kind of organizing stuff and putting like a label on it. I think there are actual distinctions in the world that have physical correlates, but they are not the boundaries projected by our language. For instance, an example I gave you earlier, if I stick a needle in my arm, I feel it. If I stick a needle in the arm of my chair, I don't feel it. That's an ontological boundary right there.

There is a differentiation. In one case, I feel in the other one I don't. So I seem to be a real thing, and I have grounds, empirical grounds, to say that I am a separate thing. But you want to go further than that and say not only like is, you know, the arm of the chair not a part of me, but also when I stab the arm of the chair, the chair doesn't feel it. Now, commonsensically, of course it doesn't. But on this view, people might be listening and going, well, hold on a second. And I, you know, if we're all just sort of excitations of a field, why do I feel the stabbing of the arm? But how do you know the chair doesn't feel the stabbing of its arm?

There is no chair. The chair is an arbitrarily carved out subset of a great image, a great appearance, a great show that we call the inanimate universe. Is there something it is like to be the inanimate universe as a whole? Yes. does that complex the inanimate universe as a whole feel when I stick a needle in the chair yes

is it pain no I would be anthropomorphizing the mind of nature if I did that is it significant no it's nothing it's like you're registering the

flotation of one neurotransmitter cell across one synaptic cleft I mean yes it builds up to an experience that you do register, but that specific little thing is negligible. It's infinitesimally insignificant, right? So, yes, the picture

is coherent. Any action in nature is felt by something, by some complex, but the boundaries across complexities are not the boundaries between things that we call things because we have distinct words for them, like the leg

of a table as opposed to the table, as a whole or where does the river end and the ocean begin so the distinction between inanimate things is merely nominal we do it for convenience you want to buy a thing that allows you to move from a to b we call it a car and you go buy a car but a car is not a thing without gravity to put it push it to the road it wouldn't run without air for combustion it will run you know without solar radiation to grow the plants that became potential trollium and that they are burned in the internal combustion engine, it wouldn't run. There is no car.

There is only the inanimate universe as a whole and living beings within it. That's my view. But I really want to know, like, where we're getting this ontological distinction, because believe me, I'm extremely comfortable with the idea that chairs don't exist, and that's fine by me. But it seems like if the only thing that exists is the quantum field or the great mind, and then there are excitations within that mind, and that's it, right? What I'm calling this chair, the physical stuff that I call this chair,

is just an excitation of the quantum field. What I call my brain and my hands and the way that they touch each other is also just a vibration, an excitation of the quantum field. Correct. But one of those vibrations, one of those excitations is a thing, and one of them is not. And why? And how do we know that? You know what I mean?

Yes. Well, we know it empirically. My ability to feel ends on the surface of my skin and then the surface of my retina. You know, if a photon bounces off the wall behind me, I don't register it. If it hits my retina, I do register it. So it's pretty empirical in the case of living beings. What determines when an excitation or a pattern of excitations is a thing or is not? It's the boundary of the complexities.

Mental states form these causal structures that we call complexes, and there is something it is like to be a complex as a whole. Where are the boundaries of the complexes? That's the question. If there is a bounded complex, then that's a thing. The appearance of it deserves the name or the reference of being a thing because it's bounded by the boundaries of the psychic complex, which determine what it feels like to be that thing as opposed to something else.

In psychiatry, this has been known for 200 years as dissociation, which is vastly empirically. demonstrated thing that happens to us all. Some people have extreme forms of dissociation, like dissociative personality disorder. It used to be called multiple personality disorder. But we don't need to go that far. When you fall asleep and you dream, you are dissociated.

You think you are your dream avatar. In fact, you are the whole dream, including the world in which your dream avatar is moving. When we wake up, the dissociation ends. we know then that we were both the dream avatar and the rest of the dream. We were doing the whole thing. So complexes can split apart and join according to a dynamics of integrated information, which has been mathematically formulated already.

And depending on how they join and split, boundaries form or dissolve. And that's the play of association and dissociation. This is known clinically. It happens in mental space. comes to human minds, all we need is to extrapolate it one layer of abstraction higher and say it happens in the mind of nature. And that's what determines what are things. I think I would be, I wouldn't have been surprised if when I said like, you know, okay, there are no chairs. There's just a bunch of stuff and we sort of put a label on it and call it

a chair. So what about like, what about, you know, selves, like minds? And I wouldn't have been surprised if you said something like, well, you remember Alex how earlier I said that. that, you know, the individuated self is an illusion and that there's only one self that we all kind of participate in. It's the same kind of thing. There's no chair, there's no you, there's no me. There is just the mind and excitations. And so it's, it's a little bit, that's why I'm like, it's a little surprising to hear you say, actually, no, there are these, these sort of things which seem to sort of fulfill this role of the self. Like there's, there's me and there's the limits of my experience and you're using words like me and my and I. And I just wondered

sort of how those go together? Well, the personal me, the I, is an illusion, but an illusion is not nothing. An illusion is happening. It could have not happened conceivably. So we have to account for the fact of the illusion. And we account for that through this notion of association and dissociation, how integrated the dynamics of integrated information form,

complexities and dissolve complexities. This is a crucial point. To say that something is an illusion means only that it's not what it seems to be or that it doesn't have fundamental existence. But you still have to account for the mechanism of the illusion. Why is this

illusion happen? How is it coming about? An illusion is not nothing. It exists as such, as an illusion. It needs to be accounted for. Can I say then that there are things but things are illusion? correct that makes sense yes okay because because okay that makes a bit more sense to me and just to be

clear are the only things which exist the great big mind the great big quantum field and that exists that is a thing and it's not an illusion and the only other things that exist like as things are unified conscious agents but those are illusions is that like a fair way of putting it all Yes, they are illusions in the sense that they are not fundamental, they are reducible, in the sense that they are not permanent, they are changing all the time. Think about your five-year-old self. It's preposterous for you to think that you were your five-year-old self, because not a single atom in the body of your five-year-old self has remained in yours all this time. Some of them have left and returned, but not a single one has stayed there all along. Your thoughts are different, your emotions are different, your outlook is different, your appearance is completely different,

it's preposterous to say you were your five-year-old self unless you want to be consistent and you say, no, I was my five-year-old self. But by the same token, then you have to say, you are me and I am you, by exactly the same token. So either you were not your five-year-old self or the whole thing is an illusion. And this is critical.

In science, the illusions have to be accounted for. you don't get a free ticket of explanatory power by saying it's an illusion therefore I don't have to say anything about it wait a moment you don't get that free pass yeah okay so to be clear there are no there are no things other than like unified like conscious agents like it's not just that oh chairs aren't things but maybe like you know planets are or something it's just like egos and the great mind are those like the only things that really exist? Well, I cannot know with absolute certainty

because we are monkeys running around the rock for only 300,000 years, so what do we know? I don't think we have good reason to entertain hypotheses like the moon has a consciousness of its own, a private conscience in their life of its own.

Or I don't think we have good enough reasons to think even of a star as having a private conscience in their life of its own. There is someone I respect Rupert Cheldrake who thinks there are good reasons for that and that has to do with the patterns of electromagnetic

fields in the sun's corona which are incredibly complex, more complex than what's happening in our brain. But there is an obvious difference in form and function when you compare a brain to a star. So I wouldn't go that far. I think we have excellent reasons to think of all life

as having conscious in their life of its own. And in fact what we call life or biology or metabolism may be the appearance of the formation of dissociated complexities in the mind of nature. That may be what life is. Now, when the mind of nature has dissociative identity disorder and forms altars, what does an altar look like? Well, it looks like a biological organism, a metabolizing organism, just like the altars in

the mind of a patient with dissociative identity disorder, look like something identifiable in an fMRI scan. we don't need an fMRI tool because we are inside the mind of nature right we just need to look around to find the other altars there is one talking to me right now so i i would go this far i think we have excellent reasons to think of all life as having private conscience in their life of its own but i don't think we have good reasons to say the same about anything else because everything else is so completely distinct from life that doesn't mean that i know for certain that But nothing else has a private conscience in the life of its own. Maybe the sun has. I don't know. I just don't think we have good enough reasons to entertain the hypothesis seriously. So I don't necessarily want you to commit yourself to saying whether like the sun does have that.

But if it did, it would then like become a thing in your language. Yes. Whereas right now you think it's, you know, there is no sun in the way that there is no chair. There's just sort of stuff. It would become an illusory thing. sure so just and also to be clear for our listeners use the word like alter i'm not sure if we defined it earlier but in like dissociative personality disorders people who feel like they've kind of got multiple personalities going on in the brain those individual personalities within the same

person's brain are called altars altars you know there's like you know one day i'm jenny the next day i'm mark and you sort of provide an analogy here that the universe is like the big brain and we are altars of this universal sort of mind, which is experiencing a kind of extreme form of dissociation between its own parts. Yes, without the connotation that it's an illness, it's just something that can happen in nature, so given enough time, it's bound to happen.

Lo and behold, it did. Yeah, and that's how we end up as we are. I think, yeah, it's a lot to chew on. And, I mean, I think it's fascinating, you know, you've, there's always a joke to be made, whenever I speak about consciousness, when I want to say something like, you know, you've, you've kind of blown my mind. There's always a really boring joke to be made about how you've like blown your own mind or something. I'm trying to work out what the best one is here, but whatever it is, it's really interesting. And I've been, you know, looking at your work for some time now and in preparation for this, I think it's fascinating. I am intrigued to know the extent to which people who are interacting with your views for the first time right now in this episode think that this is a really interesting line worth pursuing as I do. or think that we've both sort of lost our minds, as it were. There's another one. Do you find that there is, perhaps to close then, just on that thought,

do you find that there is a consistent and like understandable, but most common misunderstanding that people have when they listen to your lectures or read your books, that you might want to take an opportunity to clear up that we maybe haven't cleared up already? Yes. To say that everything is mental is not. to say that everything is in your mind. It doesn't contradict the existence of a world outside our minds. The problem is that the physicalist thinks that anything outside a personal mind must be non-mental. Why?

I mean, if you look to the horizon, it's Earth all the way until the horizon. You know there is a world beyond the horizon. Do you think it's something other than Earth or just more Earth? So what I'm saying is that beyond the boundaries of individual dissociated minds, it's just more mind, not your mind, not a mind that follows your wishes and obeys your imagination and your mourning affirmations. And no, it's not you, the illusory dissociated you. But it is mental. It has an inner perspective of its own and it may unfold in a way that is very regular, very predictable, very. very, almost mechanical, because it's an instinctive mind, not a mind that evolved over

four billion years to deliberate and plan so to conquer the world. I think it's helpful to remember that we are in the universe, we are a part of the universe, and in the way that you want to speak of individualized selves as just like excitations of a great big field, like that might sound a bit weird to a physicalist, but I think the physicalist needs to remember that they think the same thing. They also believe that the universe is just sort of made up of particles, which modern science tells us is just an excitation of quantum field, and that consciousness is just a product of the brain, and that brains are just atoms, which are just excitations of the field, which means that all you are, as a conscious

agent, is an excitation of a great big field. Your view is to say, we know that there's consciousness, We know that there's mentality. We're experiencing it right now. And since the best understanding of what we are, excitations of a great big field, that field is mental. You know, that's just what's going on.

The physicalist kind of goes the other way. They start with the field and say that there's this thing called a field and somehow consciousness fits into it or comes out of it. But it's actually not that far away. It almost feels like when I speak to someone like you that you're taking assumptions that are already agreed, read upon by a physicalist and just flipping them on their head. Yes, like, mental activity is just the same thing as brain activity because mental, because brain activity is just what

it looks like from the outside, whereas they go the other way, you know, mental activity comes from, comes from the brain. You're like, well, actually, just the appearance of the brain comes from the mental stuff. It's almost like the same desire for synthesis and monism, and there's only one stuff that the universe is made out of, but just, you know, looking at it in a mirror. You know what I mean? Yes, I thought about what you're saying. There is a commonality of values. I espouse rationalism, determinism, reductionism, and monism.

Physicalists, however, tend to think that the only rationalist, reductionist, deterministic, and monistic alternative on the table is physical. That is an astounding level of lack of theoretical creativity and philosophical blindness. We do espouse the same values, but I submit to you that the only reason you think what I'm saying is mind-blowing and physicalism is level-headed is cultural indoctrination. physicalism is the most magical arbitrary, arbitrary, gratuitous, inflationary, ridiculous, metaphysical alternative on the table. That physicalists espouse the same values I espouse doesn't mean that physicalism is consistent with those values. It is not. If you think it is, it's because you haven't given it more serious thought. you're just absorbing all the slob that comes via the airways and has come for over 200 years now. Yeah, but that's going to say, yeah, I mean, I'm pretty convinced now that, you know, like, materialism is, is just about as, as long as people understand by materialism, you know, the way that we're characterizing it in this conversation, I am pretty convinced that it is quite ludicrous.

I've been exploring, like, panpsychism is one solution to that. In your book, you discuss panpsychism under a chapter title, something like the solution is worse than the problem or something. It's like, you know, you're actually making it worse. Let's get back on track. You don't explain anything. You just shove another thing in your reduction base. In other words, you're not accounting for anything.

You're just adding more brute facts in nature. It doesn't have any explanatory power. That's why I call it the solution is worse than the problem. Yeah. Well, I've got lots to think about because, you know, I've been attracted to views like panpsychism, I think mostly due to the motivation that something like physicalism can't work, at least as pertains to consciousness, but probably to anything at all. And I think, you know, your book does this quite helpfully. You sort of go,

it's like it's what, like chapter five or six when in your book, analytical idealism in a nutshell, when you first start talking about analytical idealism. Because you have to follow this trajectory. And I've got a lot to think about, but I definitely think, you know, you I mean, when you said there, you know, the only reason why you would see this view is as more sensible than another view, the only reason you'd see physicalism is sensible is because of this sort of worldview that you've swallowed wholesale. I agree. I personally, for myself, I don't see it as a particularly viable option. And for me now, the task is trying to speak to people like you and work out what the most viable option is. And I can see why so many people are attracted to what you have to say. And if they are, especially if they've listened to this and found it interesting, but maybe raised too many questions or didn't cover enough detail or a bit of confusion going on, then those books I mentioned will be linked in the description. You've got a corpus of works, but I think those are the two to point people to for these particular topic areas. But Bernardo Castro, thank you for coming out. You've been one of the most requested guests I've

had since starting the show, to be honest. And it's always a bit of a catch-22 for me, because I kind of need to have read or seen enough of someone's work to know if they're going to be like right for me and for the show. But if I don't know, if they're going to be right for me in the show. It's a lot of work to put in, you know, like, but your name came up so many, so many times, especially as I began to start talking about consciousness. And I can see why, having now read some of your work and spoken to you today, it's been really interesting. So thank you very much for your time, and all links will be in the description. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.