Bernardo Kastrup on his book 'Dreamed Up Reality'

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Interview with Jeffrey Mishlove (ie. New Thinking Allowed) - run time 1:26:17.

Not the first time I've heard Bernardo interviewed or blog but this was probably one of the more useful/insightful interviews. He's a computer scientist by training, I believe he worked at CERN for a while, and he's an author at Scientific American whose gone his own way somewhat with respect to being in favor of idealism.

Typically when I run into people who talk about idealism it tends to be rather context-poor, in this case it sounds like he's done a lot to flesh out the content. Throughout his interview he talks about some of the mystical experiences he decided to undergo across the the spectrum between meditation, breathing exercises, and psychedelics (he's in the Netherlands so he can get them legally). There's enough here to where I think I'm gaining a lot more respect for how his perspectives on the issue took shape.

Programmer takes acid, mistakes altered brainstate for "unveiled reality", starts talking like a hippy.

I wonder where this propensity comes from for people to assume that their reality is filtered by their brain, its wvolved and acquired structures and so on, yet when they drop acid, they perceive real reality, unfiltered - rather than filtered through a differently functioning brain.

But I guess it's healthy if he needed that to intuitively understand the concept of reality being a product of a brain, which in turn uses socially constructed categories and tools to manipulate this perception, - something the social sciences tried to tell him since the 60s. ....

I get that this topic is the pinnacle of haywire Beyesian statisitics. My best guess on this - many people, especially those who like to think of themselves as more rational than other people, see this world as so awful that it can't possibly be under the auspices of a broader agency and NDE literature makes that even worse by making claims about the personality of the cosmos that run about as hard against our intuitions about the reality we live in as is possible.

It's not a comfortable topic for me even and it's not one where I'd expect much agreement with the claims made.

"awful" is not the word I'd have used.

non-human is what I'd call it. That implies that all bets are off, and a human brain can't experience it.

I'd say that, for my own capacities and what hits my radar as enough evidence that there's another significant and noteworthy thing happening, I've encountered enough to come to a very different conclusion.

In-human? Clearly. The rest though? I think people have a funny way of making up their minds on things and anymore I don't imagine that there's any factual artillery that persuades or wins debates. I'm interested in these sorts of things because I don't see naive materialism as some crowning permanent achievement in human progress, it's more of a story that we've been telling ourselves that was qualified on certain assumptions. As evidence to the contrary has come in we've had a way of then trying to slot those bits into reductive/naive materialist explanations or making leases on future recapture of those dynamics under causes that fit native materialism. It works well as a model for analyzing how small things interact in nature to yield larger effects and there are clearly very useful things that map on to that, but it seems like the evidence is decreasing rather than increasing that it's a complete model of reality. From my own observations it seems like a lot of the people I run into who really hang on to naive materialism as an all-encompassing explanation have a way of continually trying to weigh reality against Harry Potter or the bible when evaluating claims outside of reductive materialism. I've said this before in other threads - a lot of this seems to suggest that ideological entrenchments on this issue have a lot more to do with politics than science, and with that trying to convince someone out of a philosophic belief about consciousness or the nature of matter, universe, etc. is like trying to convince them to vote for a different party in congress or parliament.

I can understand partly what the conversation in the video is about, just like he says, you have to go their to have any kind of understanding. Sadly for me, I always had weak experiences riddled with fear by trying to hold on. I was tired of people telling me it was 'tha bomb', 'be careful' when in fact it was quite weak. So my friend found someone who apparently had some good stuff, sugar cubes. He claimed they were triple drops, so I was like, yea, yea. I should had known better but it was my first time with sugar cubes, all others were paper hits and gel tabs 2 times.

They looked completely saturated, like wet sugar cubes, so I popped them both in my mouth. It was the first time I actually was able to taste it, and they completely dissolved fairly quickly, within a few minutes. 20 minutes later I was already seeing waves on the TV, being all other times it took up to 2 hours to notice any effects I knew I was in for a ride. within 15 to 20 more minutes I was telling my friend that the gold trim on the mirror was sparkling. He replied, "what gold trim?", I pointed it out to him and he said, "dude, that's brown wood". So the thought hit my mind, O s***. I shut my eyes yet still saw the mirror with gold sparkling trim surrounded by darkness, it was floating off to the right leaving sparkling glitter trails behind it, like a comet tail. I began to panic a little, I ran and jumped on the bed, laid down and shut my eyes.

Then I saw these lines, each lines was a different color, they were coming from the right and the left, headed straight towards each other, when they met in the middle they crashed into each other and all kinds of patterns started busting out from the center and rapidly spreading outward, the pasterns were also changing within at very rapid rates. I quickly opened my eyes, kept them open for just a second, shut them again and the lines came back, as they crashed in the middle and started bursting with expanding patterns, it all goes blank. I have no memory of anything else that took place for 9-10 hours. It's as if I awoke, at 3am, I went to use the bathroom , everything looked normal, mostly, until I got in the bathroom, the toilet looked so low, the walls were bowed inward like I was in a bubble, round bathroom. I was trying to touch the wall but couldn't? I left after I was done and went to sleep.

Throughout my life and even before the experience, one of my favorite things to do was smoke a bowl of green and ponder about what reality is and what it could possibly be. Locked in my mind for hours, just thinking. Time gets so rearranged with me, I can't always remember the order in which I have done things. As far as I know, around 14-16 years old I got interested in magic. I got curious and questioned, true or false? I attempted several things over several years, mind related, not reading cards or anything. I felt I had discovered something, I will leave the details out from fear of judgement.

Over the years I formed a theory in which I have very good logical reasons for believe in. I call it the extended placebo. What I have come to discover for my self by many tests I preformed is somehow it is possible for you to alter outcomes of reality by sub-conscious expectancy. I don't consider it 'magic' and feel everyone does it without even knowing. I use it to explain 'the lucky person', 'the unlucky person', the placebo effect, positive sub-conscious expectancy leads to positive outcome, negative sub-conscious expectancy leads to negative out come. It's not a sure thing, it's hard to explain, but my last experience was too profound to deny, I predicted or possibly manipulated outcome to achieve nearly impossible odds. Picking 1 person out of 3 in which I would tie rolling dice with repeatedly before anyone even rolled once, seeing who goes first in a game of Yahtzee. I tied the person I figured I would tie with 7 to 8 times, then on the next roll his landed outside the box yet still tied. We didn't count it when it doesn't land in the box so he had to roll again and broke the tie. I quickly grabbed my dye and said "for sh**s" and rolled once more tying him yet again.

That including the illogical or incomprehensible infinity of existence that exists for us to be allowed to live, think and question our existence brings me to the conclusion that yes, we may be able to measure reality, but we have no idea what it actually is or how it came to be. Science only takes you back to the singularity before the big bang, it has no answer for how the energy got here to begin with or what void of existence it existed in is nor how it came to be.

*edit

O yea, it also led me to a conclusion of why people believe magic exists. To me, reading cards or saying hocus pocus or ritualistic practices does nothing, people sometimes get unexplained results due to my theory which i don't consider magic, yet in a sense feel that our ability to exist at all is magical.

Yeah I've heard that our relationship with the near future has some interesting complexity. I haven't gotten too hung up on this aspect specifically but I've heard things about precursors in cell differentiation in tad poles or human neural circuits firing a few split-seconds before events.


The degree to which people say that there's something out beyond this that not only seems powerful beyond words but also loves you beyond words - to the degree that people keep running into that and that brushes with such a 'current' if I might put it that way ends up leaving indelible prints on people's lives, behavior, actions, and they themselves sort of continue to 'spark' in ways that our current science doesn't allow for such as having abilities that aren't supposed to exist - I think all of that commands attention.


I'd agree with you this far - most people's sense of the word 'magic' means Harry Potter, and that needs about as much pruning as the bible.

The impression I get of western magic, Hermetic and otherwise, is it's a home-grown version of yoga in western parlance complete with it's own approach to sidhis and internal cosmology. In the west we tend to focus on the four planes of internal to external being as the kabalistic/qabalistic Tree of Life (and you see interesting echos of that in the Catholic mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila). At the same time it does get stranger and I still don't feel like I understand all of the different feedback loops other than to say I've been in the flow of them a few times and watched what I thought of as normal causality break down for a good week or two.

That said I also don't see particularly good evidence that this stuff is as fungible as people would want to claim, ie. if you find yourself in the flow of something big it was more like something you crossed paths with or stepped into than anything you did of your own volition. There's some evidence for Elus Cohen rituals causing rain as a side-effect or a high caliber magician leading a ceremony and a lot of participants getting nose bleeds who weren't ready for the atmospheric transforms that came along. With all of that though, as with most western magic, it's really theurgy rather than 'spells to get things', which I'd agree in that case aren't all that different from your notes on near-term effects of expectation. To that extent most of what western magic is good for is about the same as what the paths of yoga are in the east - ie. improving your relationship with yourself and the universe.

I do understand that matter is not made of matter, and that science knows not what there is - it seems, reality takes on a definitive shape only when it needs to, i.e, when matter collides. Before that, everything is some weird probability cloud. That does allow for "something".

however, if you're trying to tell me that your expecting a certain outcome when throwing a dice influences the outcome, I need to tell you about chance, bayesian probability and most importantly confirmation bias.
maybe you should calculate the odds of throwing several dice and ending up on the same sum (but not necessarily same combination) - the chances for that to happen are fairly high, really.

what bugs me about near death or drug experiences is that again: they are experiences. they are what the brain makes of its chemistry and incoming stimuli. if you screw up the chemistry, it's still a product of the brain. I have had some experiences, but I never took them to reveal anything but the workings of my brain.
I'll need something more than intuitions to assume that there's somethin else than that.

I know it's not confirmable to a scientist. That particular instance was a one time thing. I truly had no bias, I know that's hard to believe but is true. Read the story again and understand I'm not trying to convince anyone, I would honestly have little faith in someone making such claims, but it did happen. Also, I did not tell anyone what I was doing, clearly they would think I was insane and I wasn't sure it would even work. The best way to describe it is I had that drunk like confidence level in a poker game. How you feel you are going to clean house and end up dominating and taking everyone's money. Honestly, during the years I felt quite moronic for even attempting things. You have to try to believe in what you are doing which is hard to do when you feel like an idiot for even trying.

How I know I didn't step in with bias is because the original question I asked myself was, is magic real or not. I didn't care either way, I just wanted truth. I tried many things over the course of a few years and as a narrowed particular things down, I found that it's not magic at all, it would be something seemingly impossible to practice and good at. That is why I called it the extended placebo. Imagine the level of confidence and expectancy you would need for a sugar pill to aid your problem when you are aware it's a sugar pill.

I don't know how to calculate the odds.(No one is aware but me) But here they are, 3 people I could possibly tie with repeatedly(An important factor because I expected to tie with that person repeatedly), I got the person right and tied them 9 to 10 times back to back. What kind of odds are those...calculated? Consider that I also had confidence that the event would occur. So how can you just decide you are going to tie someone like that then adding you picked that person out of 3 people. To me, it was the final test that confirmed to me my theory must be right to some extent. I only did it once and it was on the spot kinda thing, I didn't set out in the night to do a test, it just came to me, I'm going to tie this person repeatedly, then did so. To me, it was amazing that I predicted or influenced the outcome. Could I do it again, probably not. Back to the sugar pill statement.

The only thing that broke the tie was him accidentally rolling outside the box. He was a country dude, he was a little freaked out, you can imagine...we had even started rolling fast. His brother and his brothers wife were the other two people. He almost quit playing, his brother convinced him to roll again, I was amazed so I was smiling on the inside.

according to quantum physics, if I bang my head against a wall often enough, one day, my head will appear on the other side of the wall, without braking the wall.
I might be still at it when the universe expierences heat death, but it's statisically possible.

having an idea of how dice are going to fall and then it happens is really not that exotic. The chances are not that low.
People win in the lottery - the chances for that to happen are lower.

The confirmation bias means: you were looking to see if magic existed, and found it. - But you don't discount the examples where someone drunk walks into a casino with confidence and walks out broke in the morning.

The scientific way is to define how to disrove your theory, then check if there's a rival theory - which I posed: random chance - and then to disprove the rical theory. This way, we stumble upwards. It has taken a very long time to arrive at this approach.
Non-scientific reasoning is always close to burning the old herbal-medicine-lady that sruvived the attempt at drowning her, because she's obviously a witch.

That doesn't mean yoga and meditation are bad - after all, they help you connect with your body and mind. But I wouldn't want to live in a place in which these are methods of reasoning... I've been to india.

I understand what you are saying...granted I'm no scientist, I have talked to many of them throughout my life and taught myself a lot, with a lot of focus on the electromagnetic force and electricity. As far as I know, the proposal of your head eventually going through the wall is a misconception, your head will never go threw the wall unless you break the wall. Uncertainty. you can't make two measurements off of a particle at once. You can locate the particle and it can express itself in multiple areas at once because it is a wave. Wave/particle duality. Particles are peaks of energy within a wave.



Like I said, I proved it for myself, I don't even consider it magic, and it has nothing to do with just confidence, it's sub-conscious expectancy, though I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what it is. Once I again, I'm sure you'll throw it off on chance and don't truly even see the actual odds at play. It's not the fact that I tied someone, it's the fact that I felt I would tie someone over and over before it even occurred, then to add I picked that person out of 3. I'm very logically driven, I wasn't looking for magic, I was trying to see whether it had any validity or not, seeking truth, not magic, and stumbled onto something completely different.

Anyway, there is no sense in debating with you about it. I'm no fool, logically driven people prefer proof, confirmable evidence, I can't offer you that, so you will naturally write it off and that's ok, I do understand, if you were to tell me the same thing and I hadn't had my countless tests/experiences over the course of about 4-5 years(The dye game was simply the most profound), I wouldn't believe you either.

Regarding "Dreamed Up Reality" Now;
The Ground is Only Solid As We Dance it.
The Sky is Only High As We Sing it.
What Else is there
But
Dance
And Song;
As Far as i Know
i Feel i Float i go High;
What is There but Fun;
I Don't Make Any Money Doing 'It';
But i Make my Reality Floating Now
All Naturally High No Way to Make
Money; Dance And Singing Partners
Come and
Go; but
They Continue
to Come What more
Do i Need to Know; Nothing but Love;
Nothing But Loving Life; Nothing But Love;
Life Is Easier
As A Dance
And Song;
Financial
Indepence
is Key and Naked
of Target Audiences
Fitting-in and Cultural Clothes.
Drugs, any Drugs Will Only Dilute 'Heaven' for me.
Anyway; Thanks For Sharing 'the Video'; The Dude
In 'the Video' Gets it; And perhaps He'll find it too;
As Far as i Can And
Will See if 'You'
Can't
Find it
On a Naked
Beach with
only 'Your'
Foot Prints 'it' Doesn't Exist.

I think the thing that's clear - most of the studies needed (whether from random number generators to Ganzfeld and the rest) are out there in large enough quantity, for people willing to look at them, for us to see that there's a heck of a lot more going on than what naive materialism would claim. What I notice more than anything is different groups of people having different clusters of facts with high congruence tend to focus on what they've found and then exclude what doesn't match as indigestible. I don't think we can triage complexity for human comfort and then expect that to lead us closer to truth and that's actually part of why I've preferred for a long time to stare right down the edge of the crease between reductive materialism and idealism - that's where a lot of the more challenging material is. At this point

I'm getting more interested in going back to richer content idealism because I want to understand what the proper content of that is and you find some of that in the content of my OP, you also find that in some of the more context-rich NDE accounts. What you seem to see in the later are people finding themselves (alive but closing in on their end) seeing 360 degrees, looking outward, looking from the outside in, seeing all kinds of mathematics in their environment that they wouldn't normally see, it's a bit like every bit of subconscious content for that moment becomes available. I don't think it can be denied that at least some degree of Aldous Huxley's filtering happens for caloric reasons, ie. if our brains ran that hot all the time we'd probably need to eat more than Michael Phelps. Energy's clearly not free, the 2nd law of thermodynamics pins us down to needing to get that from somewhere, yet at the same time we also get to see in many of these cases that conscious is quite likely not a closed system in the way we tend to think in the west, it's just really expensive or takes intense training to experience things otherwise even in short bursts.

but, but .... there have been tests, where some information has been put up very high above hospital beds of people who had out of body experiences, without them knowing - and none of them had seen the sign -
they just imagined things. - I occasionally have dreams that I remember years later, and it takes me a while to figure out when that was, because they are indistinguishable from other memories.

don't call materialism naive - it's the most elaborate worldview of them all! naive is insisting that experience equals reality - that's what every human since the dawn of man has thought. That there MUST be more is the naive stance.

Get some familiarity with the Ganzfeld and RNG/REG studies.


I'm actually surprised you interpreted it that way. When describing 'naive' materialism it's a technical term that philosophers use in describing the boiler plate 'dead unconscious matter' view and both materialists and non-materialists use it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aiay8I5IPB8

Regarding "Dreamed Up Reality" Now;
The Ground is Only Solid As We Dance it.
The Sky is Only High As We Sing it.
What Else is there
But
Dance
And Song;
As Far as i Know
i Feel i Float i go High;
What is There but Fun;
I Don't Make Any Money Doing 'It';
But i Make my Reality Floating Now
All Naturally High No Way to Make
Money; Dance And Singing Partners
Come and
Go; but
They Continue
to Come What more
Do i Need to Know; Nothing but Love;
Nothing But Loving Life; Nothing But Love;
Life Is Easier
As A Dance
And Song;
Financial
Indepence
is Key and Naked
of Target Audiences
Fitting-in and Cultural Clothes.
Drugs, any Drugs Will Only Dilute 'Heaven' for me.
Anyway; Thanks For Sharing 'the Video'; The Dude
In 'the Video' Gets it; And perhaps He'll find it too;
As Far as i Can And
Will See if 'You'
Can't
Find it
On a Naked
Beach with
only 'Your'
Foot Prints 'it' Doesn't Exist.
Hmm; Had to Quote Myself again
to Remind Myself of where i AM.. oh
By the Way is anyone Having Fun Yet; haha;
For Once Again What Else is the Purpose of Life
When Did We All Forget This Whole thing is About
Having Fun now but Oh Lord How to Do that for the Trick
and Treat is the Trick is the Treat in other Words Instant Gratification
is the Killer
of All that
Feels in
Life From
Dark to Light
in a Yin and Yang
Balance while Meanwhile
someone somewhere is still
Playing 'Candy Crush' over and
over again into Oblivion anyway
Romance Reminds me who i am the
Down and the Up and the Tides that go
Out and In the Search For Food for Hey When
You Go To Heaven You Remember the Beauty of
Hell Better Put Dark and Never Totally Go Back to the
Abyss of Black; Anyway; Truly as the Video You Provide
So Eloquently Relates Life is a Matrix of Endless Deceptions
in Covers of Cultural Clothes that Hide the Flesh and Blood and
Dreamtime out of Neo-Cortical Prison that Most folks live in Spoon
Fed Reasons as well as Ingested Drugs For Quick Fix Escapes out of Prison
As well; Sure a Beer might Do; A Joint; A Cigarette; or Even a Porn Flick too but
Oh the Beauty
of Dark
Mixed
with Light
Just the Recipe
that each Human
being will only Ever
Seek and Find within
To Mix With the Rest of
the Environment that We
continuously Re-Create As Now..
Again; the Question is, Are We Having
Fun Yet; I'm Passing through Having A
Blast Landing in the Ashes Bouncing off
Stars of Cheeks and Eyes of Moon and Yes
Sun Struck Kisses of Love that i'll Never Touch;
But Feel
more than
Ever Before
in the Dark
for 'the Blindness' is the Gift;
On By The Way in Regard to Fuller
Realities when in Flow the Feather Will
Become A Poem of Wind instead of Just Adrift;
in other Words the Tapestry of Synchronicity becomes
Filled in with Loving All of Life as Dark Becomes Light as Light is Dark;
All
that's
Left is Fun;
Almost Impossible
to Understand Until 'WE' 'REmember'
The Sense and Feeling of Beyond All Words;
So in Other
Words
Are
We Having Fun.