Materialism versus Idealism

Thoughts on comparisons between materialism -- the metaphysics stating that matter is outside mind and generates mind -- and idealism -- the metaphysics that all reality is in mind, including matter. For more details on the book behind this video, see:

Author pages:

Copyright 2013-2014 by Bernardo Kastrup. All rights reserved.

[RayRemillardActor]

Bernardo, I love this. I want to suggest some audio tweaks. The room is what we audio guys call "hollow". You can correct this a little by taking out some of the bottom end. The music, IMO is distracting during your speaking. For best audio, short of using a different room, you can use a small shotgun style mic, you can add lots of sound absorbing material to the room (like blankets), or the easiest way is to get a Lavalier Mic to attach to your collar. These wireless mics can be purchased at very reasonable prices for the average user. I mention this in the spirit of helping because I really appreciate your thinking and want as many others to enjoy it as possible.

[rcnhsuailsnyfiue]

That’s an amazing book collection! What a breadth of viewpoints. Roger Penrose, Carl Jung, Rick Strassman, Alan Watts... It lends a lot of credibility to see you’re drawing from such different perspectives. I found out about your work via your interview with Curt at Theories of Everything. Great stuff!

[mwbgallery]

Excellent, thank you for such precision and concision when sharing these positions. Keep up the wonderful and accurate presentations, books, arguments, and educational endeavours.

[michaelsteffeck]

Something I find amusing about materialists using the brain-decision experiment as justification is that the study they are referring to was able to identify the correct decision with 60% accuracy. That's 10% over chance.

There have been numerous psi experiments that have results of 10% over chance, but materialists/physicalists dismiss them entirely. Now, I'm not saying I necessarily believe in psychics, but it's a little ridiculous to accept one and completely dismiss the other.

It always comes down to belief system.

[SouIatman]

Bernardo, thankyou so much. I am really startled by and profoundly grateful for your wonderful intellect. My degree is in philosophy which I studied many years ago, in the late 90's.
The materialism - idealism debate was largely presented as if it were a solved and put to rest question, with the obviously naive camp of idealists being out of touch with scientific knowledge and pure fantasists.
I sympathised with an idealist position, on both an intuitive level and an epistemological level. It occurred to me that our ability to 'know' the 'outside' world through sense data and qualia were so flawed and constrained, that it left me with less confidence in their conclusions and assertions than the truly inescapable and defining Cartesian discovery and assertion that 'cogito ergo sum', 'I think, therefore I am'.
I remember having the profound feeling that this simple phrase had in essence captured all that we knew and could ever know for certain, and I was left baffled by the fact that most of our subsequent enquiries into the nature of reality somehow ignored this and even attempted to directly contradict such a self evident truth.
Descartes' wonderful method and his profound conclusion always spoke to me so much more loudly and deeply than the empiricist materialist arrogance which attempted to reduce all things to some meaningless random chance mess. It always left me feeling so abused to have all hope of meaning and purpose, our emotional states, our relationships, our loves and hates and values in life stripped away and reduced to quite literally nothing but random chance and highly improbable combinations of stuff (atomic bits and pieces) which has no business existing outside of a mind which perceives it.
Sorry, starting to ramble somewhat. But my gratitude is deep for your work. You have a brilliant mind, and I wish when I was at university I had stumbled upon your sharp insight into this most important philosophical question. Thank you so much.
Soul.

[anduinxbym]

Another amazing video, thanks for your hard work Bernardo!

[disposium]

Good work. If nothing else, we can appreciate experience as being real. This simple way of approaching the fact of experience, the existence of both the experienced and the experiencer as facts happening in the arena of mind is, in my lowly opinion, a perfectly valid approach to the problem of why anything IS, and why that ISness can be appreciated. And it does NOT deny the validity of scientific investigation, the accumulation of experience in a thoughtful, insightful, careful (skeptical) fashion.

[lnbartstudio]

Materialism as a belief system is far older than Western ideas about it. It was known in similar ways in India about 2, 500 years ago. It still is known and believed as Charvaka or Lokayata. It disallowed inferences by basing it's ontology upon yet another inference. Makes about as much sense as the Western Charvaka of today.

[dfcr]

Excellent excellent!! Thank you Bernardo! :)

[flavianpetrulio]

I would like to offer the following to all who care to read it with patience, - the focus is on the difference between immortal Mind/consciousness and mortal mind/consciousness (also referred to in the Bible as the carnal mind). I'm not a religionist; I am a spiritual Scientist although I may use biblical phrases from time to time.

The carnal/mortal mind needs to be defined before we begin. The carnal mind and the corporeal senses combine as one, not two. It is the level of false awareness which perceives an erroneous universe, - an erroneous universe of people; of organic birth, maturity and death; of sickness; of finite material objects as well as self-destructive negative qualities such as human will power; depravity, ego or small "i", revenge, insecurity; pride, fear, hatred, etc. etc. Most importantly, the carnal mind and its emanations have no real existence just like the images in our night dreams have no real existence.

Mortal mind is the suppositional absence of immortal Mind. Mortal consciousness is the suppositional absence of immortal consciousness. Mortal mind and immortal Mind never mix nor mingle. They are diametrically opposed to each other in the same fashion as light and darkness.

With the above in mind, I offer the following information to ponder deeply:

When we dream at night, most people believe we are in a body which can see, feel, smell, taste and touch that which appears to be solid objects in space/time. But obviously, we know we were never in the "dream body/brain." It was the carnal mind which created the belief of the "dream body/brain." But when we are "awake", most people definitely without a doubt believe we exist or live in a "real" body and mind is in the brain. Why do most people believe this is 100% true beyond any doubt?

This may be why:

1. Our night dream is an individual experience which doesn't last long and from night to night, there is no continuity. But our "awake" state is a collective experience shared by other people which appears to have some kind of continuity from day to day making us believe it must be real compared to the night dream experience.

2. From the time of so-called human birth, we were educated to believe mind was in the body/brain by other people who also believed mind was in the body/brain and consequently, this belief has been handed down for thousands and thousands of years. It's a form of hereditary hypnosis!

3. The prevailing scientific theory is that the matter universe came first and eventually, inanimate matter on this planet somehow became animate matter in the form of single living cells and evolved into conscious beings. This theory/belief/solid conviction of matter evolving mind is so deeply-rooted in human consciousness that most of mankind automatically believes it to be 100% true beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Based on #3, the prevailing thought in the scientific community is that mind/consciousness must be in the brain. After all, if you hit someone on the head with a lead pipe, they appear to lose consciousness. If you give them an anesthetic, they appear to lose consciousness. If you kill them, they appear to lose consciousness. Generally speaking, this belief causes the physicists, philosophers and medical community (I have deep respect for all) to spend a lot of time and energy trying to discover how the brain creates consciousness. So far, they have failed miserably. They really have no clue. That's why they call it the "hard problem."

They are so stuck on this deep-rooted belief that mind is in the body/brain, - they are in complete bondage to this age old model of thinking. They may have determined there are correlations between mind and brain; but that doesn't mean brain produces mind/consciousness anymore than believing the visible image on the TV screen is producing the invisible broadcast signals originating outside the TV set.

The other day, I saw clearer than ever before and it hit me like a ton of bricks, - mind is not in the body/brain or in anything at all. Just as the carnal mind is not in the "dream body/brain" -- the carnal mind is not in the "awake body/brain" either.

The finite, material universe of want and woe which we perceive via the carnal mind/corporeal senses (recall the above definition) is in the carnal mind; a product and projection of the carnal mind similar to how a movie is projected onto a screen but is actually coming from inside the movie projector. If the movie projector was shut off, the image on the screen would naturally disappear. But the carnal mind and everything produced by the carnal mind is a mirage, including itself. There is no truth in the carnal mind. It is a liar and the father (i.e. origin or source) of the lie.

If it is true that Mind is not in the body/brain, what does this tell us? It means it must have come before matter and not after matter as the theory of evolution claims. If Mind came before matter, then matter could not have created Mind. If matter didn't create Mind, then Mind must be self-existent, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating. Since the carnal mind is a mirage and a liar, it has no real existence. The only thing that could possibly be left is the self-existent, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating divine Mind.

This Mind must be timeless and space-less; it has no awareness of corporeality, pride, evil, greed, sorrow, insecurity, fear, revenge, hatred, etc.; it only knows its own incorporeal and infinite ideas of itself; it is pure and perfect, - uncontaminated by the erroneous beliefs of a finite, material universe of sin, sickness and death. All the erroneous beliefs of the carnal mind are simply unknown and non-existent to the level of divine consciousness symbolized by divine Mind. Unlike the analogy of the movie projector in which the carnal mind can be shut off, the divine Mind and its incorporeal, eternal images of itself can never be shut off. No matter what seems to happen within the realm of the so-called carnal mind, it is impossible for it to affect divine Mind in any way, shape or form! Divine Mind is impenetrable to anything which opposes its own nature. When consciousness reflects absolute Truth (i.e. divine Mind), the carnal mind spontaneously and instantaneously disappears into its native nothingness because it has no truth to sustain its imaginary existence.

In reality, there is only one Mind emanating infinite, individual expressions of the one Mind; yet at the same time still remaining the one Mind. There are not many minds.

Since this Mind is self-existent, it must be immortal and eternal. It is completely free from all that is unlike Spirit, God...because it is Spirit, God. It is our one and only real Mind. Our real, true identity is not a corporeal being (two eyes, arms legs, etc.). The corporeal being is a false image projected and painted onto the canvas of mortal consciousness by the so-called carnal/mortal mind. Our real, true identity is the image and likeness of immortal Mind, - the pure and perfect, incorporeal idea of infinite Spirit, God.

Immortal Mind has never, for one second, stopped being our real Mind (which is not in anything) and we have never, for one second, stopped being the pure and perfect, incorporeal idea of infinite Spirit, God, our real Mind. We just mistakenly believed we fell into a deep sleep, separated ourselves from immortal Mind and were mesmerized by the false belief that we became the dream of the carnal mind. Dream and dreamer are one.

As the Psalmist wrote: "As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be sat­isfied, when I awake, with thy like­ness."

[shadowolf]

I came to notice that if you identify with something you start affecting it, also when you focus on something for too long you start associating with it therefore you affect it.
How I see it is like the observer and the subject are one and the same, they have a bond once they encounter each other and they will indeed affect each other, when you perceive even in physicality you are in fact affecting the system you are in and the system affects you.
Likewise, there is a very common concept of dualism in nature and that seems to fractal outwards and inwards infinitely, meaning it does have no end and no beginning which is self-paradoxical therefore it has to have some sort of end or beginning... then again if it did we would at some point be able to reach it... so there are those ... ironically enough... 2 concepts of reality, one of which is basically the dualistic fractal nature and the other one is the one-ness unified nature of reality. This effectively makes possible a "Trinity" of states in which consciousness exists, it can be said that it is a trinity form(s)... this would make the most sense and when you think about it... when you have a scale, there are 2 forces and one in the middle that holds the balance together, so in fact, to transcend duality you have to look at the big picture... there is a trinity which actually seems to appear everywhere with the 2 forces being the means of which the 1 force or entity in the middle expresses itself, it is like seeing the yin/yang symbol and the part that separates them is actually the 3rd component, if in a scale you were unable to have the tip in the middle that holds the scale together then you would have either one or the other fall-off... So in the end material and mental are the same thing, the one thing we ought to look for is consciousness as that one thing that holds everything together, we ought to study the glue or the original root cause and not the end result, that is fundamentally why science is always chasing its tail... simply because it seeks results and not root core causes.

[jaredprince]

Solipsism is the rejection of all outside oneself, the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

[rhYT]

I think the Helen Keller story explains a lot.  It seems that without sight or hearing she was almost entirely just "mind", the exception being that she had the sense of touch, hot, cold, etc.  But with only touch she did not seem able to put it all together and was like a brain in a vat.  Her teacher, Annie Sullivan, must have been very wise as what she did was help Annie, using her only sense of touch, to build a larger picture of the external world. This example should silence anyone who disagrees with the Kantian transcendental idealism, namely, that our view of the external world depends on our apriori engine, or core, which always will, given experience with objects, generate the same time & space picture of reality.  We can question the ultimately validity of the apriori engine, but not it's usefulness.  So against materialism this says that we only know the apriori version of the so-called material world and have no way of knowing what we might be missing.  Rather than claim "this is how reality is" materialists might want to back down a bit and say "this approach leads to improvements of living conditions and profit by manipulating things and energy in so far as we are able to understand them", with emphasis on "in so far....understand them".    

[koen]

Okay, at about five minutes you say that just by having a generated image of a working brain is not proof that it creates consciousness and I would agree with that point. However, we have since learned of things that can happen to a person when something messes with the general processes of the brain, say lobotomy or an aneurysm. We observe major change in personality and their general experience of life. How do you account for that in your view? Or am I misunderstanding your views in some way?

[vishnusnair]

@bernado read Sankara bashyam on Upanishads Geetha brahmasutras, especially mandukyakarika. All are adwaithisams ( philosophy)

[aseeroha]

I think the flames are the result of combustion. Or am I wrong?

[bristol]

On a new birth of philosophy from the ashes of materialism

Materialism is the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.
This doctrine in its modern form seems to have originated from the secular philosophers of the
Enlightenment, and from the writings of Voltaire and others seems to have become established
in western thinking together with the secularization of society and its opposition to the power of the
Church. 

The critical turn of thinking appears to have been due to an incompleteness in the  metaphysics of
Descartes. Descartes, for all of his originality and brilliance, overlooked the integration of mind
and body, as noted by Leibniz, by dividing reality into two completely distinct realms, one
of extension (the body) and one of mind, which is non-extended.  This worked out well in practice,
by accomodating Newton's new mechanics, since his mechanics only apparently dealt with the physical world,
and freed science from dealing with mind (and divinity) by simply ignoring it. Today,
with the advent of quantum mechanics, we know that this is not true, for
quanta are mental, not physical, since they are not independently in spacetime.

 In materialistic thinking, the mind is a product of the brain and  controlled by it.
This however cannot explain intentional acts, which originate in mind. It also
allows materialistic thinkers to ignore concepts such as the soul or divinity,
giving justification for secularism, and opening up the possibility of dialectical
materialism.

Leibniz pointed out that matter, since causality must be mental and not physical (since there are
no such physical entities as momentum, for example) must have some mental correspondent.
Leibniz called this mental correspondent the monad.  An example of a monad is a quantum.

Another serious problem with materialism is that physical entities in spacetime are contingent,
meaning that they are not permanent and fixed, as Bertrand Russell thought they were
in his theory of descriptions. They are thus poor, ephemeral referents,   since they both
move and continually change.

An example of a possible correction to materialism is given below, although obviously
others might be able to do better.


The three levels of reality in platonic physics

FIRSTNESS -FIRST PERSON (I) -Mind- The One, the Monarch- this is the realm of Plato's Mind. It is life itself, pure nonphysical intelligence. Purely subjective, timeless and spaceless -     with innate knowledge and a priori memory, containing the pre-established harmony, necessary logic, numbers - the womb of the WHAT.   Mind creates all, perceives all, controls all. Thus the individual mind controls the brain,    not the reverse. Mind plays the brain like a violin.

SECONDNESS – SECOND PERSON (YOU RIGHT HERE) ental objects so both subjective +objective- The Many.  In this, the WHAT separates  from  Mind and becomes a  HERE.  Accordingly. Heidegger referred to existence as "dasein". "Being here." Some of these objects, such as ideas, or mathematics, are not monads, since they have no corresponding physical bodies.

    According to Leibniz, all monads are alive to various degrees.   There are of three gradations of life in these,     according to Leibniz:

    a) Bare, naked monads, which we can think of as purely physical  ( Eg, a fundamental particle).

    b) Animal and vegetative monads, which Leibniz calls souls, which can have feelings, but little intellect.

   c) Spirits (corresponding to humans), which have, in addition, intellectual capacities.  Mind transforms physical signals in nerves and neurons into experiences. If Mind then reperceives or reflects on these experiences, they are said to be thoughgt or apperceived. To be apperceived is to be made conscious. Thus consciousness is the product of thought. Intentions are also made in the same way, so that we caqn say that thoughts are intentions by Mind.
The human brain is a monad which contains as subsets,   mental capacities.  Neuroscience tells us that there is binding between  monads for parts and functions of the brain, but since monads cannot act directly on each other, this binding must be indirect, through the sequential updates of the perceptions and appetites of the subfunction monads. These must be made by Mind, either directly or through the preestablished  harmony PEH). Unfortunately the Stanford Leibniz site on Leibniz makes no mention of the action of  Mind on the individual mind,   IMHO a gross shortcoming.

Sensory signals and signals for feelings must also go through such a binding process.  In a sense, the   binding process plays the role of a self, but in conventional neuroscience self is a function of  the brain, rather than the other way round, as common sense suggests and the intentionality of  self or mind  proves, along with the need for a PEH.

This shortcoming in conventional understanding of the brain becomes all the more nagging if we  consider thinking, which is closely related to apperception, because it must be conscious.Thinking, we submit, consists of consciously manipulating and comparing such  apperceptions.  

 Through Mind, with its potentially infinite wisdom and intelligence,   intuitions and thoughts can arise spontaneously in the individual mind.  If these are to be immediate and/or original,   it is reasonable to believe that they originate in Mind, rather than  indirectly through separate although bound parts         of the brain. Anyone who has experienced a vocal duet in which the vibratos are in phase should become         convinced of this.
       
        Mind is the monarch of the intelligent mind, which controls the brain. Mind plays the brain like a violin.        Mind is also is able to focus on a thought for a brief period,   within the context of one's memory and universal memory,         for purposes of thinking an comparison, making the biological brain and its  complex bindings seem hopelessly         indirect and subject to confusion.


THIRDNESS – THIRD PERSON (IT OVER THERE) Corresponding physical objects as is appropriate- -here the object is born or emittted     from the monad--and emerges into spacetime as a particle, becoming completely objective,     a WHAT+ HERE +WHEN.,   In addition the Thirdness of a private thought or experience is its     public expression in some appropriate form.

3. Conclusions
This format allows us to examine quantum phenomena from inside out and perception, thinking and consciousness ontologically- from physical nerve signals to mental experiences such as thought, consciousness, and cognition.  It also avoids problem encountered in “bottom-up” science, such as complexity and emergence, if for no other reason than there is no apparent way of conceiving of a singular control point at the bottom.

--
Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (retired, 2000).

[robheusd]

2 - Flames cs combustion & brain activity vs consciousness. You inverted the causality of flames vs combustion. Flames indeed do not cause combustion, but the other wat around. So in the analogy of brains vs consciousnes, the brain represents combustion, the flames consciousness. That brain activity comes BEFORE consciousness in the temporal sense is also known, because we can measure that the brain state occurs before our conscious experience of that state. Which again shows that the physical brain is primary to consciousness.

[skivvykiv]

Hi Bernardo, great video! Quick question.. If all reality is subjective to ones mind, then does this do away with objective morality or does idealism better explain why we share morality by an all encompassing consciousness (ie. God)?

[chrisw]

I don't believe there is a exclusivity between Materialism and Idealism. I think these two ideas, or at least their most sophisticated and rational approaches, eventually meet in a representation/agreement of reality. The similarities are far greater than the differences, and the differences truly are hashed out once we just converge on "Is this *inside* the mind? Is this *concrete* reality?" and so on. The *ultimate* values behind Materialism and Idealism actually converge. I imagine a kind of superposition between some of the claims of Materialism and Idealism, where elements of **both** representations, that seem contradictory, are actually simultaneously operative.