5 Reasons to rethink a materialistic worldview: Highlighting Bernardo Kastrup

I have spent the majority of my life dedicated to the innerstanding of the meta. Metaphysics, spiritual truth, and the abstract nature of reality- the one we have seemingly lost touch with. The very nature and symbology that God is, all around, in all things. But for the last 5 years, I have taken a very different look at the world. I dove, head first, in an attempt to understand the world of matter and specifically the materialist's worldview. I am not an academic or really intellectual by nature. Rather, my journey has been comprised of vast experiences that have continually drawn me deeper into the heart of my life, here and beyond, and it's been anything but "academic" in nature.

I have come up with one thing exploring the cartesian model of reality. It's interesting, heady, rational, deep in other ways, and often involves a weak spot for me, glasses. But more often has left me yearning for...well, the mystery. So much certainty gave me a bit of the blues. All of the fundamental qualities, where I feel most alive and connected, seem to be something that one must actively search for in a world of compartments and fragments. And you can get lost rather quickly and some fail to emerge from such black holes.

It was time for me to rehabilitate my true self and find a way out of the hole and emerge back into that alluring sensory nature that I thrive in. Back to wholeness, the heart, nature, and God. A field where we are seeking to reconnect our parts back into a space of love and alignment.

I have found a bunch of intriguing, mostly men, who seem to be in a similar space and time. I view it as the "academic awakening."

I couldn't be more titillated by the witness and precise articulation these men have. And the shear bravery to stand and speak in the face of a culture in such disarray. Especially of anything outside of a field comfort zone.

We are traveling over a digital spectrum, back to a place I have once been. It's a pleasure to be seen and understood.

Bernardo Kastrup is one is these fellow travelers. This is from a recent youtube video Bernardo made discussing the 5 reasons, according to him, why materialism is baloney.

1. It's internally inconsistent: Kastrup proceeds to say, "it defines matter as that which has nothing to do with qualities. It exhaustively describes through a list of numbers as quantities and then it tries to reduce qualities to matter. In other words, having defined matter as that which has nothing to do with qualities, it tries to explain the qualities in terms of matter- that's the hard problem. It will never work because you know you're just trying to chasing your own tail at some point."

2. It's incoherent: "because matter is an abstraction of mind. We have no access to this thing called matter, all we have access to are the qualities of perception which are mental. And we infer theoretically through a step of theoretical abstraction that behind those qualities there is something that modulates our cognitive apparatus to generate the qualities of perception, but that's pure abstraction. You cannot even visualize what matter is, because the moment you visualize, you're bringing qualities into the picture and having done that, it tries to reduce the mind that has done the abstraction. It tries to reduce that mind to its own abstraction. That also doesn't work."

3. Matter was initially created to describe mass, weight, speed, direction of movement...frequency and amplitude of all those things. He proceeds, "the qualities we see around us, the colors of the world, the sounds, the textures of the world. To describe what it would feel like to have a certain experience. Now think, if have have 2 pieces of luggage, one is five kilos, the other is 50 kilos, if you're told that, then you will know that it will feel heavier to carry the 50 kilo piece of luggage as opposed to the 5 kilo piece. The 5 kilo will feel 10x lighter. So the numbers were descriptions. But then something weird happened. When we decided that the numbers preceded the thing described BUT that the thing described was generated by our brain -inside our skull. And what is really out there, are the numbers floating in a vacuum. Mathematical equations floating in a vacuum. That is an inversion of logic of catastrophic proportions. It's like trying to say that after you drew the map by looking at the territory, now you want to say that the map precedes the territory out of the map. And then- they call it the problem the hard problem of consciousness. And they think that in version 2.0 or version 3.0 of the map, we will be able to pull the territory out of the map."

4. Empirical reasons; Kastrup proceeds, "There are 10 or more types of mental phenomena that show a direct correlation between reduced or impaired brain function or activity with an enriched and much more intense experience. So these are inversely proportional for a whole host of phenomena out there such as psychedelics. They dramatically reduce brain activity they don't increase it. Yet, according to Johns Hopkins research, you will have one of the most remarkable experiences of you life. Also, with brain damage or those who undergo surgery for removal of tumors, which inevitably causes a bit of collateral damage in surrounding tissue, people show a remarkable increase of self-transcendence and identify with a much larger part of the world and enriched inner life post as opposed to the reductionistic view of just their bodies within a smaller life experience. Similarly with veterans with brain damage or even those whom experience syncope. They are often more in touch with the spiritual side of life post. In fact with syncope, we often perceive this as a state, at least externally of unconsciousness, but in reality many people come back as having rich transcendent or spiritual experiences. "

5. Research in physics: "Physical entities do not exist prior to measurement. We cannot say that measurement only discloses what the physical entity already was prior to measurement. Many confuse this with thinking that there is not a world outside of the objective world. There is a world outside of what is measured it's just not physical now. For example, an airplane dashboard only can measure what it is sensing. Physicality is only there if you take a measurement on the world, but the thing that is measured exists, it's just not in physicality yet until it is sensed and measured."

Kastrup concludes that most certainly pre-physicality does indeed exist. And it can be likened to that of transpersonal augmentation. We have further theory's, abstractions.

Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch philosopher and author who has written extensively on consciousness and the nature of reality. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering and has worked as a research scientist in industry. He has written several books and articles on topics such as the nature of consciousness, the relationship between science and spirituality, and the implications of recent scientific discoveries for our understanding of the world. Kastrup's work is heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and he has been a vocal critic of materialism and reductionism.