Bernardo Kastrup on idealism, search for meaning and the religion of AI
Implications of a physicalist world view
I have been listening to several interviews with Bernardo Kastrup, an idealist philosopher. Idealism is a philosophical group of ideas which asserts that "reality" is indistinguishable or inseparable from human perception and/or understanding. Conversely, physicalism postulates everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical.
It sounds egotistical or contrived to base the entire observable universe in terms of human experience. But idealists point to the hard problem of consciousness as one of many issues with physicalism: how and why is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?
Other problems idealists bring up about physicalism are related to issues relating to quantum mechanics. For instance, action at a distance is a phenomenon where matter does not exhibit locality:
Two particles interact and fly off in opposite directions. Even when the particles are so far apart that any classical interaction would be impossible (see principle of locality), a measurement of one particle nonetheless determines the corresponding result of a measurement of the other.
One explanation would be that the two particles are affected by some hidden variable, although experiments have arguably ruled hidden variables out.
Idealists feel that attempts to unify the quantum and observable realms lead to contrived models that include the multiverse, an almost infinite number of unobservable universes, and this is unlikely according to Occam’s razor. And there is still the hard problem of consciousness.
According to idealist, it’s simpler that our consciousness creates the physical world rather than trying to define our consciousness in terms of the physical world (of which we are only aware from our consciousness).
There’s more that I may write about the topic in another post, but I found this exchange particularly interesting. It related to the implications physicalism has to meaning and human experience.
[Bernardo Kastrup] It's not even clear to us anymore that the story we tell ourselves about what we are and what the world is and our role in it is the key source of meaning in our lives.
Why are we not aware of this anymore? And I think that's because of fluid compensation to use a technical term in psychology, we are fluid compensating all over the place. We've replaced authentic sources of meaning with self validation with the idea of leaving work behind that survives us with differentiating ourselves as part of an elite group. This, this happens a lot among scientists.
So even if we adopt a worldview that is flat and bleak as I would say the mainstream physicalist view that consciousness doesn't even really exist. That is so flat and meaning draining and bleak. But we don't notice that because we find ways to fluid compensate and find other sources of meaning.
When we killed God in the second half of the 19th century, we were quick to erect another edifice of meaning giving and that has evolved now. And we link that to artificial intelligence, that has evolved now into Singularitarianism, which is a purely physicalist religion, which postulates that if we create an AI that can build a better version of itself faster than we could, then that would accelerate the evolution of AI exponentially. And then we would create the fact of God who would then take care of us. Like we take care of animals in a zoo. I mean that's the religious impulse. The search from meaning right there.
We never abandoned that search for meaning even though we fluid compensate and we find sort of decoy targets for it. But if you ask me honestly, where do I think it went wrong? I think it went wrong the moment we started telling ourselves and believing that the world we see is all there is to this story that the world is its own meaning as opposed to being an image of something else deeper as opposed to being how the world as it is in itself presents itself to us. But there is this extra dimension of depth and meaning.
The images that we call the world are pointing to something beyond themselves.
[Curt Jaimungal] Appoint meaning. Sorry to interject. Can you explain what you mean? When you say the world is it itself is meaning today on their physicalist.
[Bernardo Kastrup] Anthology matter is all there is. So if you have a material world around you then there is no extra dimension of depth to that world. That world is all there is. So whatever meaning it has it is that meaning because it's not pointing at anything else, it's not representing anything else because it's all there is. And this is a notion that is today called naive realism in philosophy.
We know from science and philosophy that this is absolutely and categorically wrong because one evolution wouldn't have given us a transparent windscreen to see the world as it actually is. Evolution doesn't do that evolution equips us to survive. So evolution would have given us a dashboard of dials, not a transparent windscreen into the world.
We also know from hardcore neuroscience that if our inner representational states, our perceptions, if those states mirrored the states of the world as it is in itself, our interstates would be too dispersed and we would basically dissolve into an anthropic soup. We wouldn't be able to maintain our structural and dynamical integrity.
So we have to encode the information we have about the world in an inferential manner, in order to maintain our physical integrity. So we know that the world, as it is in itself, is not what we see, or even measure through instrumentation, because even measurement follows the.