Seeking I Debates / Does the Brain Produce Consciousness? Dr Bernardo Kastrup and Dr Gerald Woerlee

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Time Links
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0:00 - Prologue
2:01 - Dr Kastrup's Opening Statement
6:49 - Dr Woerlee's Opening Statement
12:15 - Open Discussion
1:21:12 - Questions

[Sassan]

Someone really needs to try to give Bernardo Kastrup more publicity. I'm sure even one debate with any of the intellectual celebrities like Sean Carroll or Sam Harris would be enough to get him the attention he deserves.

[homelander-enjoyer]

To be honest, massive respect to Dr Woerlee - most materialists scoff at these ideas, but he was happy to have some fun and think about it and play with the idea. What a champ!

And Kastrup was great as usual!

[spirit]

Bernardo Kastrup will charge the modem world I believe he is on something big. Good work guys

[Royalroadtotheunc]

What a pleasure to see two gentlemen debate with full respect for each other's ideas! Let us be advised that the age-old materialism-idealism debate will not be resolved or go away anytime soon...

[marktetzner]

A likeable and soft discussion, much different than many debates you see these days. A respectful exchange of positons. When can we see the next round?

[hamzariazuddin]

I am a skeptic when it comes to ESP. But I have huge admiration and respect for Bernardo. I find his philosophy very interesting and admittedly, despite being biased towards Materialism (but not a full blown materialist), I can rarely disagree with anything he says. He is very thorough and careful with words. I love his rigour. Now ESP anyone know of any good experiments done that show signs ESP may be possible? I cant come across any. Any links or resources would be much appreciated. I am fully aware of the replication issue in these, like most psychology/social experiments

[nietztsuki]

I wish Bernardo had been given the opportunity to respond to Dr. Woerlee's defense of the materialistic answer to the 'hard problem of consciousness.' To me, that was the elephant in the room in this entire debate, yet he was not given a chance to set forth his objections to materialist position directly. The two of them could have spent the entire hour discussing this issue alone.

[lioneye]

This wasn't a debate this was Kastrup teaching a student

[leandrosilvagoncalves]

With all due respect to dr Gerald Woerlee, it's about time materialists realized they have been chasing their tails for quite a long time. It's time to think outside the box. I'd love to see more researchers studying Bernardo's position which could bring lots of new advancements to many areas of knowledge.

[moesypittounikos]

You can tell Woerlee is impressed with Bernardo.

[highvalence]

Woerlee addressed the hard problem with the standard answer of 'consciousness emerges at a certain level of complexity'. A standard reply to that is that it appeals to magic. I am not sure about that but I think the important point is that appealing to complexity doesn't solve or get around the hard problem because what still hasn't been explained is how, by virtue of complexity, consciousness emerges or is produced. One has just introduced one potential way in which consciousness can be thought to emerge or be produced but one hasn't gotten any way near solving the hard problem.

But I’m not sure how the part about life programming is thought to explain consciousness as a product of brains and bodies. Is the idea just that life programming of a certain type together with complexity produces consciousness? If so, then the same problem applies: one has just introduced one potential way that consciousness can be thought to be produced without explaining how, by virtue of life-programming of a certain type together with complexity, consciousness emerges or is produced.

[solarpoweredafricanvegansp]

What a fascinating discussion! So amazing to see 2 different people with different opinions coming together and sharing their perspectives with respect. Doesn’t get much better than this.

[samrowbotham]

Many people have told Gerald that his claim that people who have NDE's are hallucinating them does not stand up to scrutiny, people come back with veridical information which is corroborated by others so it's not anecdotal. Furthermore, scientists love to use labels by claiming its a hallucination they have not explained anything they just labelled it.

[bst]

1:30:40 My dad said he saw someone's head briefly turn into a skull once, he thought it was strange (of course) but thought no more of it. Then, a week later that same person died from being hit by a lorry... there's no way he could have smelt that he would be hit by a lorry. There is also a story of someone who signed off pilots going to battle in the second world war, where he knew the people who would die because he saw their heads as skulls. Again, you can't smell that, its not an illness that will affect them in the future, it's a physical event which happens in the future. It may in fact be synesthesia, but not by seeing smells, but seeing a different sense which may be dormant in a lot of people. Who knows. But it does certainly seem that the explanation is more complex than the sense of smell.

[brebeaa]

Bernardos point about Materialists needing to choose whether they believe the higher brain generates self perception or not really got me thinking. If higher brain activity is what generates self-perception, self aware experiences like NDEs which happen when the higher brain is “offline” are big questions indeed.

[krishnapartha]

I’d love to grab some beer with these guys. What a polite loving conversation. ❤

[peterstanbury]

Materialism requires an absurd logical bootstrap for its very existence. On the one hand materialists deny naive realism. A materialist will be the first to admit that none of our conscious experience 'is' literally the external world. And yet, materialism cheats by treating mental experiences such as space and time as if they ARE literal one-to-one experiences of the external world. Materialism has to cheat in this manner....otherwise it has no handle on the external world whatever. But it means materialism is totally based upon circular reasoning and a bizarre bootstrapping that one is expected to overlook.

[zakhust]

I agree with Bernardo on almost everything, however, when they were talking about NDEs, I don't understand why Bernardo said that the NDEs with accurate perceptions are implausible or not important, I disagree, maybe I'm misinterpreting his position on that aspect of NDEs but that's what I understood from what he said, or maybe he just has more interest on NDEs that have more focus on the transcendental.

[birthingblokes]

great conversation thank you, helped my learning a lot.

[anduinxbym]

Decades ago, as a child, before I even knew what idealism was, I encountered the arguments of Woerlee while I was looking for answers to big questions. Listening to him speak feels like watching a rerun of an old show.
In the past he was heavily focused on combating substance dualism and supernatural interpretations of near death experiences. In this debate, it seemed like he wanted to bring some of those old arguments into play - such as his objection to the "reducing value". However, those arguments are not effective against a modern idealist.