This AMA with Bernardo Kastrup was recorded February 9th, 2022, on the Analytic Idealism Discord Server.

Analytic Idealism Discord Server:
https://discord.gg/qw4jrjpUDG
r/AnalyticIdealism subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalyticIdealism

Dr. Bernardo Kastrup has a PhD in computer engineering and another one in philosophy of mind. He is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. He is known for works like his books “Why Materialism is Baloney”, “The Idea of the World”, and “Science Ideated”, where he lays out a comprehensive and hard-nosed argument for why reality is mental.

0:00 – Welcome.
2:20 – A brief summery of Bernardo Kastrup’s philosophical position.
3:58 – What school of economics do you subscribe to and do you think capitalism is sustainable, or is socialism the future of humanity?
6:33 – What do you think about super-determinism as a way to preserve physical realism?
10:54 – Does analytic idealism allow for free will, in the robust sense of “could have done otherwise if the universe were re-wound”?
15:11 – Could the universe have been different?
17:26 – When did you discover idealism and what was the pivotal moment when you fully started to believe in it?
23:56 – You said that the results of the 2019 experiment of local observer independence scores some big fat brownie points for relational quantum mechanics. If the results are presumably consistent with all the possible interpretations, how does this score points for RQM in particular?
30:26 – What’s your opinion on Nietzsche’s view that God is dead?
39:13 – How does analytic idealism explain phantom limb pain?
42:26 – How does music fit into your world view?
49:25 – What are your thoughts on the relationship between matter and the speed of light and how does that relate to consciousness (mind-at-large)?
58:01 – How do you reconcile the apparent contradiction between the dashboard metaphor and the wave/ocean metaphor?
59:44 – Does consciousness have a nature in itself that does not appear as a pattern?
1:02:18 – Why does Mind-at-Large get excited at all?
1:06:35 – Does consciousness (mind-at-large) have subjective experience when it is not excited?
1:13:00 – Is core subjectivity consciousness unexcited?
1:13:53 – Why don’t you also value the insights of the Vedic sages on the existence of reincarnation and the hierarchy of dissociation?
1:17:23 – Why don’t you favour a model hierarchy of dissociation when the Hindus and other Eastern faiths seem to favour that kind of model?
1:20:46 – What do you think of the people who say that the many-worlds-interpretation is the most parsimonious because it postulates only one kind of thing?
1:26:04 – Are you going to have a chat with Eben Alexander?
1:28:07 – What do you think of Spinoza’s monism being compatible with analytic idealism?
1:34:21 – The misrepresentation of Spinoza reminds me of the people who say that the collective unconscious is biological.
1:36:37 – Is a talk between you and Joscha Bach going to happen?
1:39:53 – Are you familiar with Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain?
1:40:53 – How do the dispositions of the left and right hemispheres fit into analytic idealism?
1:47:38 – Does analytic idealism have anything to say, metaphysically, about the concept of enlightenment?
1:48:31 – Who is your favourite contemporary philosopher, intellectual, thinker, or personality?
1:51:36 – What is the meaning of life, what is it all about?
1:58:03 – Is meaning continuous?
2:06:40 – Do dream characters have inner life?
2:10:45 – What makes the case of rejecting inner life of dream characters different than rejecting solipsism?
2:14:08 – Could you steel man physicalism?
2:17:46 – What seems to be the physicalist’s resistance to accept something like mind-at-large?
2:23:33 – Floki makes an appearance.
2:23:48 – Can you be an analytic idealist while holding the view that mind-at-large is meta-cognitive?
2:26:03 – Were you aware that in their own times Kant and Fichte (but not Hegel and Schelling) were idealists?
2:30:12 – What are your thoughts on recent [correction: 2006] studies on ayahuasca showing increases in brain activity?
2:40:02 – How do these researchers account for the fact that the effect sometimes went the other way around?
2:43:10 – Is there any difference between human made objects and things that were in MAL before our civilisation began?
2:44:58 – Are you familiar with Chris Langan and his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe?
2:49:23 – Do we construct what we see rather than re-construct it?
2:55:27 – Can you elaborate on why in one case the dashboard-of-dials is an accurate extrinsic appearance but in the case of Miller it is not?
2:57:23 – (Illegal question) Can you answer in Portugese?

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