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Show Notes
This is a ~1 hour 20 minutes conversation between Bernardo Kastrup (https://www.bernardokastrup.com/), Richatrd Watson (https://www.richardawatson.com/), and me on topics at the intersection of physics, cognition, consciousness, etc.
CHAPTERS:
(00:00) Evolution, Agency, Meaning
(06:25) Analytic Idealism Explained
(15:55) Spontaneous Cosmic Teleology
(26:34) Metacognition, Behavior, Agency
(39:14) Microbial Minds, Cosmic Loops
(51:23) Materialism, Meaning, Science
(01:04:25) Naturalism, Attractors, Meaning
(01:11:03) Blossoms, Bias, Multiscale
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Transcript
This transcript is automatically generated; we strive for accuracy, but errors in wording or speaker identification may occur. Please verify key details when needed.
[00:00] Richard Watson: It's really exciting to have the opportunity to chat with you, Bernardo. My background is in computer science originally, but I've spent my time thinking about evolutionary biology and the algorithm of evolution by natural selection that Darwin described and whether that is sufficient to explain the biology of complexity of life that we observe and how that interacts or doesn't with the agency of living things. Mike and I have been talking recently about the need for science to tell better stories, stories that don't eliminate meaning. They should be able to describe the things that we're interested in in a way that doesn't explain them away, but actually allows them to play roles in things that matter. We don't want to try and rewrite all of reductionism and materialism. We leave that to the philosophers, but the particular areas where we potentially have some knowledge are origin stories. What's the scientific origin story at two different time scales? One origin story is over the evolutionary time scale, where evolution by natural selection is all about survival of the genes, survival and reproduction. And it turns out that it doesn't mean anything. It's just that if you survive, then you do, and if you don't survive, then you don't. What persists exists. The other time scale is development of an individual organism coming into being over developmental time, and that's all just one organic molecule pushing and shoving another organic molecule, and there isn't really any organism at all. The other area is cognition, where the reductionist account is that there's nothing to see here. That's just neurons firing or it's just algorithms turning. But there's no holistic cognitive self that has any agency, any real agency. We're interested in scientific stories, scientific narratives that don't do that, that don't eliminate what was interesting about those areas of science, but also do a better job scientifically of explaining the agency of living things.
[03:11] Richard Watson: Explaining how development works, explaining how evolution works. In particular, the self-referential aspects of evolution where evolutionary processes modify the mechanisms of their own axioms like variation, selection, inheritance modified by the organisms that were supposedly created by the process. Changes in the level of individuality where evolutionary units at one level of organization become parts within an evolutionary unit at another level of organization. The higher level couldn't exist if it wasn't made at the lower levels, but the lower levels seem subservient at the high level. What's going on? We don't have good scientific accounts of that. I'm interested to hear your thoughts about how to connect those areas, in particular cognition and evolution, with the idea that the nature of reality isn't material, that the nature of reality is a universal consciousness, a selective field, and that individuals are fragments of it, which makes sense to me. What's the relationship between those fragments of universal consciousness, those disassociated selves, which has a cognition-first aspect or consciousness-first aspect? That's the fundamental. On this other story where we say the materialist world is just an interface, a limited ability to perceive what's there, and the real stuff is behind that. The machinery of molecules, genes, natural selection and the rest of it evolved organisms with their limited cognitive apparatus, which, so far as they can tell, is interested in survival and reproduction. Sometimes that machinery produces entities which are cognitive and can then reflect back on that, which seems like it was created out of the material stuff as though cognition was a product of the evolutionary process. So how can we reconcile that story where cognition is a product of a materialist process, where our cognitive selves are built by the process of evolution by natural selection, versus a cognition-first story where that's the prime mover, the thing that was there forever and always? And this materialist instantiation is just a projection or an interface onto that reality. Does any of that perspective make a difference to how we actually understand how the biology works within that materialist framework that we share? Or does it not really make any difference?
[06:25] Bernardo Kastrup: When an idealist says consciousness first, the claim is that it's the type of existence consciousness that is primary. It doesn't mean that every higher level cognitive function that we have cataloged was there from the beginning. An amoeba or a single-celled organism does not metacognize, does not self-reflect, does not deliberate. That empirically shows that not every cognitive function, not every higher level mental function is there from the beginning. Otherwise, amoebas would have an existential crisis. They don't seem to do that. The claim is not that all cognitive functions were there from the get-go. The claim is that the ontological type that we call consciousness, mental stuff, experiential stuff, that is what was there at the beginning. Then dissociation or life happened because it can happen. Given enough time, it was bound to happen. Dissociation is this process in mind space that can happen. It did. The first living beings or the first dissociated alters, the ones that could reproduce, are still around. Amongst those, the ones that could be more effective at surviving and reproducing, the ones that had higher fitness, are the ones that are still around. Higher level mental functions are very useful for fitness. They have evolved over time. For me, evolution holds and evolution does account for higher cognition, for higher level mental functions. What it doesn't account for is the miraculous appearance of experiential stuff out of stuff that wasn't experiential to begin with. It is this ontological jump, capturing the hard problem, that I think is fallacious, not the evolution of cognition itself. I think that clearly evolved. I don't think nature in its primordial state before the evolution of life had features like metacognition, self-reflection, self-awareness, deliberation, and all that. I don't think these were there from the beginning. I think these evolved because either they were directly useful for survival and reproduction or they came as side effects of other things that were useful for survival and reproduction. There is a sense in which, at least, analytic idealism is quite reductive, Richard. It's reductive in the original and pure sense of the word, which is how do we account for complex things in terms of simpler things? What it doesn't do is two things that our culture has come to associate with reductionism, but which in fact have nothing to do with reductionism, which is the misunderstanding that reductionism is from the large to the small, rather than from the complex to the simpler. The other thing we associate with reductionism is what Jung called "the nothing but," meaning that when you manage to account for something complex in terms of a simpler thing, we have the tendency to say, and that's all there is to it. There is nothing more to the thing I'm accounting for than the properties I have just accounted for in a reductionist manner, from the complex to the simpler. Accounting for something doesn't exclude the other things. Accounting for one thing doesn't automatically imply that you have accounted for everything that is salient. I think this is what an idealist would be careful about: not mistaking what reductionist means and not falling for the "nothing but" trap that Jung described. Other than that, it is pretty much a reductionist, evolutionary approach to things.
[11:00] Richard Watson: So that still leaves open the question for me about whilst we might be happy with the idea that amoeba don't have existential crises and that there was an evolution of high level mental functions, which not all living things share. Nonetheless, at the origin of life and before it, all of the things that we're talking about are part of universal consciousness. It's just that they were tiny fragments that can't do the same kind of cognitive gymnastics that larger fragments can do. They're of the same essence. If we imagine that they're not, that they just don't have it, then, as you say, when we get to the entities with higher level cognitive functions that are having existential crises and wondering about the nature of their experience and pondering the hard problem, we end up with this hard problem where we can't connect those two things. But still, how does the high level cognitive functions that evolved which doesn't require any experientialists. We can tell a story about higher level cognitive functions evolving because they were useful for survival. We can tell that story without any experience of anything. How does that connect with the experience that we have as organisms with high level cognitive functions? We have an experience. Does that have anything to do with that story about how the high level cognitive functions came into being?
[12:46] Bernardo Kastrup: The idealist would say, This problem doesn't exist for us because we do not postulate anything other than experiential states. If the starting point, if the states of the universe immediately prior to abiogenesis, were already experiential states because that's all there is, then these higher level cognitive functions are built out of experiential states because that was all there is. There is nothing else to ground these higher level mental functions. We can abstractly conceive of cognitive functions that do not entail experiential states. That's a theoretical abstraction. The point of the idealist is that you do not need to invent theoretically any state that isn't experiential. Since experiential states are nature's given, it's what we have before we start theorizing. That is enough to account for everything. Why are we going to postulate something else to account for nature when we can do that based on the only ontological given, the only pre-theoretical given? If you accept that, the problem you're alluding to just disappears. These cognitive functions are sentient because sentience is all there was, is all there is. Everything else is a theoretical abstraction that may or may not be justified. The idealist will say it's not justified at all. It creates an insoluble problem, doesn't explain anything, and is inflationary.
[14:28] Richard Watson: I think what I'm reaching for or asking about isn't just the hard problem. Given that our high level cognitive functions and the experience that we have are not different things. There was never any way to have described high level cognitive functions or anything that wasn't built out of a subjective field. What does that knowledge mean for how agents, how organisms act as agents? How have we got that mechanistic materialist story? For example, that we end up with a story where it was our simpler parts that caused our complex wholes instead of the other way around, that our complex wholes were orchestrating our simpler parts. And that our reason for being comes from an evolutionary process rather than parts of that subjective field creating the evolutionary process.
[15:55] Bernardo Kastrup: I know where you're coming from. Most people who hear about idealism and start thinking about it against the background of the mainstream worldview make the jump towards this notion that there was some plan behind evolutionary history, that since it all began in a mind, in mind space, then evolution is somehow the product of the deliberations or the planning of that mind. But idealism doesn't really need that. This would be a form of theism. Under idealism, one, at least under Analytic idealism, one would be perfectly content to say there was no deliberation at all. There was no plan at all. The original state of this field of subjectivity did not entail any kind of metacognition, any kind of higher level mental function that would allow for deliberation. Things just happened, like materialism would say. Things happen because they could happen, and given enough time, they were bound to happen. So it's entirely reconcilable with Analytic idealism to say there was no plan, there was no explicit intention, not in the sense of intentionality, which just means perception, but in the colloquial sense of the word. There wasn't necessarily any intention, any explicit motivation for what happened. It could all have been entirely naturalistic and spontaneous. And we have evolved higher level cognition and the ability to deliberate and plan and all that, because these things either were directly relevant to fitness or were side effects of other cognitive abilities that were relevant to fitness and not because there was some kind of universal telos. Now, that said, I personally suspect there might have been a universal telos, but not a deliberate one, a rather instinctive one. A crocodile will instinctively look for the sun when it needs to warm its blood. Is that a product of deliberation? I think most biologists would say, no, it's an instinctive teleological thing. The crocodile does it because it has evolved to have the mental dispositions it has. So I am open to the possibility that mind at large or that universal field of subjectivity, which is all there is still, may have had certain dispositions because to be is to have properties. You are what you are instead of something else you could conceivably be. So your being is defined by the properties you have. So that field of subjectivity would have had properties. In psychological language, you could say there were implicit archetypal templates inherent in that field of subjectivity, predispositions to certain mental behaviors, instinctive and spontaneous as they were. And part of that may have had a hand in evolution, a blind hand, but a hand nonetheless, a bias, a preferential direction, instinctive and spontaneous. I am personally open to that. But even people who aren't open to that, Analytic idealism is still perfectly reconcilable with a purely naturalistic, unbiased evolutionary process, because essentially what you have is a world made of states, just like materialists say, but those states are experiential as opposed to being abstract. And those states have inherent dispositions, they have properties because they are what they are as opposed to something else they could conceivably be. And therefore they did what they did. There is no higher plan, no overarching goal or teleological arch. It could have all been entirely spontaneous. I just happen to be personally open to an instinctive global telos, but that's me.
[20:37] Richard Watson: Did I hear you say that the kind of deliberative cognition that we do, one wouldn't imagine the universal subjective field is doing?
[20:57] Bernardo Kastrup: I think that is very unlikely. I think that would be an unjustified anthropomorphization of the universe because why would it? We are apes. It took 4 billion years to put us together. We are very recent, 200 to 300,000 years old, modern humans, sporting an intellect for about 50, maybe 30,000 years. So we arose yesterday, a blink of an eye ago, after 4 billion years. Why would our modes and capacities of cognition be the same as nature in its raw state? I think that's incredibly unlikely. And if that were the case, if nature already had built-in primary high-level functions in it, then an amoeba should have an existential crisis. But we haven't seen that happen. If you look down a microscope, these animals always look for food and run away from danger. And they keep doing that until they die. They don't just suddenly stop and meditate.
[22:14] Richard Watson: I don't know that we would look to people looking down a microscope at us. I take your point that the particular kind of cognitive machinery we have is only one particular corner of life as we know it. So it would be weird to imagine that the entire universe was just like us, as if waiting for us to get there to have a conversation. On the other hand, it also feels weird to imagine that universal consciousness is dumber than us and that we are somehow exceptional in that story.
[23:12] Bernardo Kastrup: I didn't say that.
[23:15] Richard Watson: No.
[23:18] Bernardo Kastrup: I think there can be tremendous spontaneous intelligence. Look at savants or even people with acquired savant syndrome. They do not have any metacognitive insight into the calculations they perform. There is this guy who was struck, had some form of trauma, and now he can perform incredible mathematical calculations at the drop of a hat. If you ask him how he does that, we're expecting him to tell you a series of introspective steps that he follows through. He would say, "No, I just know the answer." That is a tremendous capacity to process information. In other words, intelligence that does not require any kind of introspective metacognitive function or higher-level mental functions. It's all done spontaneously. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that, due to its sheer size and complexity as reflected in the image we see — the universe — the original field of subjectivity prior to dissociation had a tremendous data-processing capacity. In other words, it was incredibly intelligent, despite not having higher-level mental functions of the metacognitive type. I'm pretty open to that, but I think it's extraordinarily difficult to argue that it had metacognitive functions from the get-go. Even if you look at the high-level structure of the physical universe, according to the latest cosmological simulations, it does look like a mammalian brain. Surprisingly enough, if you do a spatial Fourier transform, the distribution of matter across the universe, including dark matter, in terms of network structure, is just like a mammalian brain. Franco Vazza and Alberto Felletti have been studying this for many years. They have astounding results. You can find them in the peer-reviewed literature. That suggests that, just like us, there is mental processing going on in the universe as a whole, not only in mammalian brains. If you take into account the speed-of-light limit, there is no way that there are closed loops of information integration at that large universal scale. The universe is too big and expanding too fast, and the speed-of-light limit is too low for any kind of re-entrant loop of information integration to have happened. Everything we know about metacognition and the science of consciousness today tells us that there is no consciousness without re-entrant loops, at least no metacognitive consciousness. In other words, reportable experience — not only experience that is there, but the experience that the subject knows is there and therefore can report. I think metacognition is very unlikely, but intelligence broadly defined — I think there is such a thing as spontaneous instinctive intelligence.
[26:34] Richard Watson: You think that the difference between those two is real and not just a frame of reference, right?
[26:41] Bernardo Kastrup: I think it's very real. I think clinically it's impossible to deny that it's real. I think Savant syndrome shows us that it is real. You can perform incredible feats of intelligence without even an iota of metacognitive insight of what you're doing.
[27:02] Richard Watson: But you can also zoom in a little on somebody that's reporting metacognitive experience and all you see is something that appears to be a non-metacognitive flow of information around a network. Where inside do you find the metacognition? If you step back and you see the system as a whole in its context, then you see the metacognition, but as you step in, it's not there.
[27:38] Bernardo Kastrup: Yes, we do not have a satisfying theory to conceptualize that right now. That is correct. I was talking to Giulio Tononi the other day about this, trying to figure out a path forward. I can tell you what Giulio's hypothesis is. The hypothesis is that there is a particular type of mental state associated with the prefrontal cortex that is able to mirror other mental states to create a re-representation, another copy of other mental states, but in a separate loop of introspection. And that is then what we call conscious metacognition or metaconsciousness. It's the ability to re-represent our own mental contents in metamental contents or re-representations, which is then what we report. We report the re-representations. There can even be disalignment between the two, as Jonathan Schooler showed 22 years ago. They can even be dissociated. In other words, your re-representation can be distinct from the original experience. You can fool yourself metacognitively. So that's the hypothesis we have going forward, because re-entrant loops are necessary to even explain a unified experience according to integrated information theory. So for a metacognitive experience, you need something more than just re-entrant loops. Giulio's hypothesis is it's a different kind of state associated with the prefrontal cortex that has this mirroring capacity, this re-representation capacity. But regardless of whether we have a good theory, a good conceptual account or not, it is experimentally and clinically established that there is a distinction between consciousness and meta-consciousness, raw experiential states and re-representations. They can even be dissociated, as Jonathan Schooler showed. On an empirical basis, it's there. The question is, do we understand it enough to create an internally consistent theoretical model that has some explanatory power. For that, the jury is still out.
[30:10] Richard Watson: So the conscious states, metacognitive or not, how do they make a difference to the mechanisms of the biology as we know them? Does that question make sense?
[30:31] Bernardo Kastrup: I can give you first a dry conceptual answer. In the formalisms of IIT, Integrated Information Theory, what matters is the causal structure of a complex of information integration. So every phi structure has a causal structure given by the transition probability tables, the so-called TPT. If you have re-representational states in that, it changes the cause of structure. And if the cause of structure is changed, then that may lead to different behavior. Metacognition clearly can lead to different behavior. That's an implication of the theory. I think empirically it's also obvious. There is little difference when we are talking about simple spontaneous behaviors, such as people with blindsight. If you throw a ball at them, they still move their hands and catch the ball. They report that they don't see the ball because a re-entrant loop gets cut, either because the corpus callosum was severed or as a result of trauma or even the progression of dementia. The behavior is still there. In simple things like somebody threw a rock at you and you need to catch it, whether you can metacognize the experience of seeing the ball or not doesn't matter. You will still catch it if you can. In other aspects of life, I think metacognition plays a clear causal role. We become capable of deliberation and our behavior changes accordingly.
[32:20] Richard Watson: I think it plays a role because it matters to our survival and reproduction.
[32:26] Bernardo Kastrup: If metacognition leads to different behaviors that increase our chances to survive longer and reproduce, then those features would be fixed in the genome by natural selection. I think the evolutionary storyline stays largely intact.
[32:48] Richard Watson: So do you think that that's sufficient to recover genuine agency for living things?
[32:56] Bernardo Kastrup: What do you mean precisely by agency?
[33:01] Richard Watson: So in evolutionary theory, we are used to saying that environmental variation is just noise. If you have genes that make you produce seeds, that's great. If you don't have genes that make you produce seeds, that would be bad. But given that you do produce seeds, whether the seeds are blown by the wind onto rocky soil or fertile soil, that environmental variation is just noise to which genes get selected and which genes don't. If our genes caused us to take a particular behavior that mattered to our survival and reproduction, that would be visible to evolution by natural selection. It would matter to which genes survive and which genes don't. But if we actually did something of our own volition, something that wasn't caused by our genes, then that would be like the environmental variation that evolution by natural selection couldn't see at all.
[34:03] Bernardo Kastrup: Yeah.
[34:04] Richard Watson: Anything that we do as agents is just noise and doesn't affect evolution. Is there any genuine agency for us in being able to matter to what happens, or is everything that we do only what we do that's caused by our genes?
[34:26] Bernardo Kastrup: I can give you a defensive answer and a real honest answer. Analytic idealism is compatible with the position that, in the sense that you attribute to the word, we don't really have real agency. Is that what I think? No, it's not what I think. If you look at paleoanthropology and you look for the dating of the evidence we have for the rise of modern humans anatomically, that puts us back two or three hundred thousand years. And if you look at the evidence for symbolic cognition, for the ability to replace elements of reality with cognitive representations that point at something beyond themselves — in other words, conceptual reasoning, which is related to agency. If you don't have conceptual reasoning, you're purely instinctive. And then there is no agency in the sense you attribute it to the word, I think. But if we can think symbolically, then you can say, I did it because I decided to do that, not just because instinct moved me in an autonomous fashion to do that. So the evidence for the latter, for symbolic thinking, is 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. Before that, there is no such evidence. And this raises a very uncomfortable question. Whatever genetic mutation took place that enabled us to express this extraordinary ability, unique in nature, to think symbolically, to develop language, to perform rituals. Whatever genetic mutation enabled this happened about 200,000 years before the capability was actually expressed. It lay dormant for 200,000 years before one of us, for whatever reason, discovered that it was there. This is extraordinarily implausible because we are talking about the most significant genetic mutation in the history of life on Earth. We are saying it happened and it was affixed in the genome for no reason. At first, it had no survival advantages whatsoever. It did nothing because we didn't use it for 200,000 years until we did, for whatever reason. Ian Tattersall, he was the curator of the Hall of Human History in the American Museum of Natural History. He wrote this extraordinary book in 2012 called "The Masters of the Planet." In the book, he says, "The only reason we have to believe that such a fantastic thing happened is that it obviously did, because short of the empirical acknowledgement that it did happen, it would be preposterous to say that the most consequential genetic mutation in the history of life happened for no reason." It had no fitness delta associated with it for the longest time until its possessors for some reason discovered it. The implausibility of this is so fantastically extraordinary that I think it leaves a gaping hole in our account of agency in the way you defined it. And therefore, the jury is out about a better hypothesis. In other words, I think personally that vanilla neo-Darwinian evolution doesn't do it. I think it's very implausible that it does account for it. But those who think it does account can still be analytic idealists.
[38:56] Richard Watson: I have so much more that I wanted to tell, but how are we doing, Michael?
[39:07] Michael Levin: We're doing great. We've got 15 minutes. Go for it. Keep going.
[39:11] Richard Watson: Are you sure? Do you not want to come in?
[39:14] Michael Levin: I have just a couple of things. From the beginning, I've been sitting here thinking about amoebas' existential crises and what the hallmarks of such a thing would be. How would we know? I'm in no way claiming that all of our cognitive capacities were there from day one. I do think that there are differences ultimately, but I'm not at all sure that they can't have their own version of an existential crisis. There is a very similar version of metacognition that Chris Fields draws attention to, which is that you have a bacterium, and typically what they're doing is measuring the local sugar concentration, and they want to go up the gradient. But there's an issue because that sugar, for example, might be poisoned in some way. Some bacteria, in addition to that, also measure the output of their own metabolic system. Instead of measuring the outside world, they look inwards and they measure themselves. There's a second-order metabolic loop that overrides the first loop and says, okay, you may think that you're going up the gradient and that's great, but if the metabolism actually isn't going well, I'm pulling the plug on the whole thing. We're going to tumble and go somewhere else. That, I think, is a very primitive version of the metacognitive capacity where you're making judgments about your own state as opposed to states of the world. I don't expect there's any way—it's not the same as being able to articulate it linguistically—but I do think there are very simple versions of metacognition that some of these things have. I've been sitting here thinking about what a unicellular existential crisis would look like and how do we know when each of us is having it? How do we know metacognitively when we are having it? I have a question for Bernardo. The universe and the speed of light being too slow for the recurrent loops—can you talk about what it's too slow for precisely? That is, what does it need to be in time for? If we assume that the overall cognitive frame rate can be anything—maybe it just thinks super slowly—what is it not in time for with these loops? Can you say something about that?
[41:43] Bernardo Kastrup: Can I first quickly comment on what you said, the prelude to your question? Analytic idealism is much more accommodating in principle of there being some primary pseudo-high-level mental functions in nature than materialism is. Materialism would say mentality itself, mentation itself, is something that arises out of complexity. How much complexity can you have in a cellular organism? So it closes the door fundamentally very early on. Analytic idealism postulates that there is a field of subjectivity to begin with; mentation, in and of itself, you already get for free. It's a question of what kind of mental functions then evolve. Analytic idealism is accommodating of the hypothesis you raised, while materialism is not. I personally tend to be skeptical of high-level mental functions being there from the beginning, but analytic idealism is accommodating of your hypothesis, certainly much more than materialism. Now, these re-entrant loops at the universal scale—according to our current cosmological theories, shortly after the Big Bang, there was a period of inflation in which the universe expanded many times faster than the speed of light itself. What that means is the universe is still expanding much faster than we think it should. That's why we came up with this notion of dark energy, which is almost 80% of the universe, invisible as it is. So if you take these two factors into account—the rate of universal expansion, the rate at which space is being created in between things, and the speed of light, which has stayed roughly constant for as long as we could measure it—one could even say it is constant, and the variation is measurement error. The jury is still out on that, because we defined the meter in terms of the speed of light, so we defined it to be constant in meters per second. But setting it aside, that speed-of-light limit is very low at a cosmological scale; 300 million kilometers a second is very low. So it never catches up with the rate of expansion. In neuroscience, there's very little agreement on anything, but there is agreement on what I'm about to say now. For metaconsciousness to arise, you need back-and-forth communication between two different brain areas, usually something down in the motor-sensory area and something up in the neocortex. You need a closed loop in which information goes from one to the other and back to the first. To do that at a universal scale between two different regions of the universe, given how much the space in between them is growing, how fast the spacing between them is growing, and the speed-of-light limits, it's very difficult to imagine that a loop could be closed for information transfer. You may say, well, entanglement. There is a theorem in quantum information theory that entanglement cannot transmit information. This is one of the most reliable results in quantum theory because it's proven. It's not something that you need to measure. So confidence is very high. So from that perspective, unless we postulate that the physical universe we see is not the complete image of the mentation in the mind of nature—that there is more going on than we can measure and that these re-entrant loops are being closed in that which we cannot register—it's very difficult to imagine that the universe is having a deliberate metaconscious thought of the kind that you and I can have. It can be intelligent in a very spontaneous, instinctive way; there is nothing that precludes this possibility. But higher-level mental metacognitive functions, as we understand and measure them in our own brains through neuroimaging, are very difficult to imagine occurring at the vast universal scales because of the rate of expansion and the speed-of-light limit.
[46:35] Michael Levin: The expansion thing is interesting. Just another question about the entanglement part, the theorem you speak of that says you can't pass information through it: is that specifically for external observers, or does it apply to the system itself from the inside? The distinction I'm drawing is systems in which there's a screen between what external observers can see and interpret of what information is passing versus the system itself. Does this theorem cover both, or is it only for external observers?
[47:29] Bernardo Kastrup: Only external observers.
[47:30] Michael Levin: What I figured. I think, and again, I'm not particularly pushing this, but it sounds to me like there might be a little wedge here in terms of what all this really says is that we as external observers cannot catch these loops, which I think is perfectly plausible. That doesn't mean they're not happening within the mind of the larger system.
[47:58] Bernardo Kastrup: That's correct. That would be David Baum's implicit order idea. That there is an explicit order and an implicit order. In Baum's theory or hypothesis, in the implicit order, in other words, in the universe from its own first-person perspective as opposed to an external dissociated observer, information doesn't need to be transmitted because information is already there where it needs to be from the get-go. There is no spatiotemporal extension. So there aren't two places across which information can move. There is just a holistic, unified, non-spatially extended entity, which is the implicit order. It has direct access to everything about itself because it's not extended. Things don't need to go from one place to the other. The empirical counter to the hypothesis is that you could say we too, from a first-person perspective, are not extended. All my thoughts and emotions can be immediately accessed through links of association, cognitive association. There is no transmission delay. When I introspect, I don't find a spatiotemporally extended field. I find a unitary, monistic, integrated conscious point of view. And yet, when we go under an fMRI or an MEG tool and have our brain activity measured, neuroscientists consistently see this back and forth of information across brain areas when viewed from the outside. If that is the case for us, I think the null hypothesis should be that this is the case for the universe at large too. But if that cannot happen for the universe at large, then we start having to think of the possible ways in which the image of the cognition of the universe at large differs from the image of our own cognition, even though we are part of the same universe. We have to justify why the rules of the game change when you go across scales. You're not making any fundamental ontological shift. You're just going across scales. Why should the rules change? You would have to come up with an argument for why the rules should change at that level. That I think would be the key difficulty. It doesn't mean that it's impossible. It only makes explicit what the epistemic challenges are there. I see you are thinking about some daring possibilities here, and I am the one coming across as the conservative idiot. I'm not used to being in this position. Very interesting. I'm probably more open to what you're thinking than I'm letting out right now.
[51:23] Richard Watson: I get that sense too. I wonder if I could bring us back to the narratives that do a better job of retaining meaning. Does any of this help us tell a story that is either better science or science that doesn't eliminate meaning?
[51:50] Bernardo Kastrup: I'll give you my cautious answer first, and then I'll share with you what I think. From a philosophical perspective, whether a hypothesis makes us feel good or not is entirely irrelevant. What matters is what do we have good reasons to entertain as a viable hypothesis? Objective reasons. In other words, what we have good reasons to think of as potentially being true. And the moral or psychological or some other subjective consequences that truth may have, that's all a problem. If we don't like what is true, too bad for us. But what is true is what is true regardless of how we feel about it. So from a strict philosophical perspective, the criteria for choosing a hypothesis is not whether it's socially nice or whether it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside and gives meaning to our life. The criteria is, do we have reasons to think of it as true, regardless of how it makes us feel? Analytic idealism is built around this notion. For me, it was a real struggle to do it that way because I don't like the key implication of analytic idealism. It makes me feel very uncomfortable, which is the notion that consciousness witnesses death and goes through that major state transition. Let me impress upon you why I don't like it. If you take a high dose psychedelic drug, it can have an incredibly bad trip. I have had two. That happens when your brain metabolism is reduced a little bit, because that's what psychedelics do. So even when your brain metabolism reduces a measurable little bit, you can have a horrible experience. Imagine when there is no brain metabolism at all, not even a brain. Goodness, help us. I don't like that implication of analytic idealism. I was much more comfortable with the notion that consciousness just ends and therefore there is nothing to fear because I would not be there to experience fear or suffering or pain or anything. But I think materialism is completely untenable. We have no good reasons to believe it, even though it made me feel warm and fuzzy in my youth. We have what we have good reasons to believe is analytic idealism, in my view. Now, having said all this, if you look at the history, do you have three more minutes on this answer? I have been thinking about this for 25 years. So if you look at how materialism started, it started as a political tool. The founders of the Enlightenment knew that it didn't work as a metaphysics. There are those on record saying materialism doesn't work. "Probably all matter is instinct with life, not an abstraction." But we had to use materialism as a weapon against the church. Why? Because the church was burning scientists at the stake like Bruno in 1600. Somewhere around the middle of the 19th century, when the bourgeoisie, after the Industrial Revolution, started accruing social influence, the game became not just to survive the clergy; it became to supplant the clergy in social influence. Therefore, materialism had to be literally true, and mind had to be something reducible to matter, because matter was a domain of science. Mind or psyche, which also translates into spirit.
[56:01] Bernardo Kastrup: And so that was the domain of the church. It's not enough anymore to survive the church. It's not enough even to entertain dualism, which was the default view between Descartes and Goethe. Until Goethe in 1830, dualism was still the predominant view. That too was not enough. It was not enough to share territory with the church. We had to conquer everything. And then we started truly believing in materialism, this abstraction that nature's given, pre-theoretical experience, could be reduced to an abstraction of mind itself. It's like a painter that paints a self-portrait and then points at it and says, "I am this portrait." And now the painter has to account for himself in terms of patterns of pigment distribution on canvas. That's exactly what we are doing with materialism. We invent non-experiential states as a theoretical idea. And then we try to reduce the pre-theoretical given to that theoretical idea. Mind tries to reduce itself to one of its products. That's like a dog chasing its own tail. But we beat that bullet because it had major payoffs around the middle of the 19th century, supplanted the church and got rid of the fear of death, which is what the church had used for 1,000 years to control the entire population of Europe. How could the church, without an army of its own since the end of the Templars in the 14th century, control the entire continent? Well, because it had its hands on the lever of the fear of death. It sold indulgences, became a major temporal power on the back of that fear. That was off the table around the middle of the 19th century. The greatest coup since the Reformation. It was a major, major step. But what we lost was meaning; that was the price we paid. Nietzsche chronicled that. At that time, he was a contemporary of this transition. He chronicled it in "The Gay Science" and then in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." He spoke of the end, the death of God, that we killed God and we had blood in our hands. And he anticipated the Letzter Mensch, the last man who would live without meaning and therefore would have to stupefy himself and distract himself into numbness in order to survive. He predicted that in the 1880s. And here we are: the last man. We'd lost meaning. So now we watch reality television, eat sugar, and drink alcohol. That's how we stupefy ourselves out of the hole that is the absence of meaning. This probably was a great idea in 1850, but we've been accruing a price for this, to the point that it's unbearable now because we are meaning-seeking animals and we are being asked to trade meaning for the reassurance that there is nothing to fear after you're dead because you're not going to be there to experience it. There is only so far we can go down that path. So if science, which since the middle of the 19th century has taken a positivist, behaviorist turn, science as practiced, not as a method, but as practiced by humans, considers it a value in a theory if it takes meaning out of the equation. Theories sound more scientific if you take meaning out of the equation. Everybody wants to be the tough guy who stares the hard facts in the face and has the balls to say it's all meaningless. And you differentiate yourself when you do that.
[1:00:12] Bernardo Kastrup: You differentiate yourself from the gullible masses on the street. You're a better person now because you have the balls to stare the hard facts in the face. That's the psychology of that. It has absolutely nothing to do with nature. There is nothing written large in nature that says theories that stand a chance to be right are the ones that eliminate meaning. Why? Is it etched in stone in nature? It's completely arbitrary. It's a side effect of our teenage human psychology. That's essentially what it is. We are going through a self-affirmation phase. We are 14 years old and we want to impress the girls by showing how tough we are and staring the hard facts in the face. I think there is a high likelihood that the actual facts of the matter intrinsically, inherently carry meaning value. I think good science, therefore, should be open to that possibility and not discard it because of some moral value that arose as a side effect of our adolescent psychology. Now, what would that story be? I think analytic idealism as a philosophy, not as a science, creates a level playing field. But the scientific theory has to be a theory of life, because that's where meaning is discernible. It must be a theory of life that restores the notion of meaning, which was excluded for arbitrary reasons. What would that theory of life be? I think it would have to entail, and now I'm going to contradict what I said in the beginning of our conversation, some form of teleology. Not necessarily, I think, a meta-conscious teleology, a deliberate plan that was there from the beginning and that arose out of very high-level thinking, planning, and deliberation. Not necessarily that, but some form of teleology nonetheless, an instinctive teleology, a spontaneous teleology, but something that acknowledges the quality of the universe. If the universe is made of mental states, then those states are fundamentally qualitative. There is a quality to every mental state. That's what defines them as mental states. So could this spontaneous universal teleology be about the quality of the end states of the universe? Is it biased towards a certain quality space in our parameter space? Is there a region in our parameter space associated with certain qualities towards which the universe is naturally biased? Is the universe pushing towards those qualities? How could we argue this? What are those qualities? Why should we think the universe is biased towards them? Which you then could translate as, what is in it for the universe to get to those states? What will then make the universe feel like? Because that's the only way to explain the bias in a mental universe: what is the psychological payoff for the universe to be spontaneously and instinctively biased towards certain qualities, towards a certain set of end states? That would be a theory that directly restores meaning. I am certainly not capable of developing that. I'm not a biologist. I just talk. I don't do any experiment. I'm just a ***********. You guys are the ones to think about it, I think.
[1:04:25] Richard Watson: The notion that there must be a payoff seems to me a hangover of the orthodox story that everything is explained in terms of costs and benefits, survival and reproduction. What does it mean to me? I'm important.
[1:04:54] Bernardo Kastrup: A psychological payoff is of a different nature, but go ahead.
[1:05:02] Richard Watson: Whereas if you let go of a competition between selves as being the prime mover of everything — that this self survives and that self doesn't, so therefore the properties that this self has are better in the sense that it survives than the properties that self had. If you let go of that as being the prime mover and you think of it all as being part of the flow of a cognitive self at a higher level of organization, then that flow isn't about the costs or benefits; it's just what it does. It's the nature. The driver, the prime mover, is the driver of the cognitive process that creates its own structure and the structure that carries the process, right? That's the kind of interaction between the structure and process that's needed. And it isn't about this structure outcompeting that structure or this process being better than that process.
[1:06:16] Bernardo Kastrup: That's naturalism. I'm completely open to this. That's my default position. The point I raised was, if we want to restore meaning to an origin story for life and humanity. Can we do that based purely on the naturalism you explained? Or do we need some psychological bias towards certain qualities? Because then the meaning of going through the moves is to reach the instinctively anticipated and desired end state. If what's happening is akin to attractors in chaos theory — they have this name because it suggests they're pulling from the front, while in fact no such thing is happening in chaos theory. The system converges to an attractor, not because it's been pulled from ahead, but pushed from behind, given its regularities and properties. So if that's what's happening, is that compatible with the notion of meaning? Because then the attractor is just a misnomer. It's a kind of illusion. We are not being pulled from the front. There is no bias towards a certain quality of existence. It's just the standard play out of the dynamics of nature, which are determined by nature's intrinsic dispositions. Because nature is what it is, it does what it does. Because it does what it does, it will end up somewhere, not because it is instinctively desiring the qualities of that somewhere, but because it's just being itself. It cannot be other than itself and do what it does. Is this latter story compatible with meaning? I don't know. I tend to think that it's not. For meaning in the sense of teleological purpose to be there, we need a kind of qualitative psychological bias woven into the very fabric of this field of subjectivity that nature is. An intrinsic like-and-dislike scale. Am I getting warmer or am I getting colder? If I'm getting colder, I will change what I'm doing because I don't like where this is going. But if I'm getting warmer, I keep on trying. If I get stuck in a local minimum, maybe the system needs some kind of reset so we can go down the optimization landscape. I am intrinsically biased towards the warm as opposed to the cold, because the quality of warmth is more welcome to me, given my intrinsic subjectivity, than the quality of cognizance. If this is what's happening, and analytic idealism creates the space for this because it assumes that everything is mental anyway, this kind of psychological bias under analytic idealism could very well be the case. You still don't have a deliberate plan, but you have a bias that expresses itself continuously in the play of things. In other words, nature is always making a subtle choice at some level. It makes that choice not because it thought it through, but because it is what it is. It simply likes warmth more than coldness. So it tends to change things if it's getting colder and changes to stay the course if it's getting warmer. If this is what's happening now, meaning is entirely back and you don't even need metacognition for this. Does nature value higher level mental functions? Even before it knew what higher level mental functions were, is that what nature instinctively is driving to? Or is it harmony of some level? In other words, less fight, less competition. That doesn't seem to be the case. The history of life on Earth has been very bloody for the past 4 billion years. Does it value some form of self-awareness above other potential mental states? Does nature value a quality above some other quality? I think that is the question. If it does, you don't need planning, you don't need deliberation, you will get it automatically in the normal course of things.
[1:11:03] Richard Watson: You talked about the blossom on the tree that imagines for a moment that it's all about itself and wants to conquer the tree versus recognizing that it's in service and sacrifice to a larger story that it doesn't understand.
[1:11:22] Bernardo Kastrup: I'm amazed you read that. Usually that's not a part of my story that scientists read.
[1:11:30] Richard Watson: I wouldn't be telling the whole truth if I allowed you to believe that I read it. I watched a YouTube video. There's the blossom's ability to comprehend the tree and the flow of the lineage in which it is a part. It doesn't have the cognitive capacity to comprehend that to itself. It's just going to look like a personification of itself. It just looks like everything else is just a blossom like me. I don't see the tree. I just see other blossoms. But the balance between the separation that the blossom has and, if we imagine it having a subjective point of view, a frame of reference that is relevant to it, in contrast to the frame of reference in which its environment and it sit together in partnership, in a flow together, that stepping in and stepping out of those different frames of reference is where the key is, right? When I step into the frame of reference of the blossom, the stuff that's outside of me, that stuff over there, that's not me. When I step into the frame of reference of the blossom's environment, the blossom is not me, right? But they are a mirror of each other. They exist in so much as one creates a space that is the perfect shape for the other one to exist in. This pushes back to create its own space in that they are the perfect complement of one another. When you step back and say, from the external frame of reference — neither the frame of reference of the environment nor the frame of reference of the blossom — I'm stepping back outside of that system now. I'm looking into that system from outside. I say, they're the same. They're really just one thing turned around on the other thing. They're not really different. They're just reflections of each other. Then you do another kind of stepping out and you say, they're the same and they're different at the same time, right? When I step into the frame of reference of each of the parts, I see that each part sees the other as non-self, as different. I take the other part's point of view and it sees the other as non-self, as different. But I can also see that they are the same, that they are just a reflection of each other, that they only persist to the extent that they are the perfect complement of one another, that they're just the same thing turned around. So then I realized that the entire concept of being the same and being different are just the same concept that's turned around. It's just a comparator. It's the negative of the comparator, the negative of the equals function. It's the not-equals function. They're the same thing, really. They're just turned around. And before you know it, you go meta, meta, meta, and now you know everything is the same and everything is different. That whole dynamic of taking frames of reference — where you step inside a micro frame of reference and a macro frame of reference and a meta frame of reference that sees the frame of reference — that's the kind of dynamic where I think harmony, complementarity rather than separateness is the quality that arises from that. That's the quality in which all of that exists: all of that sameness, all of that difference, all of that connection, all of that separateness. The difference between existing and not existing is being of a quality that enables those kinds of stepping in and out of frames of reference.
[1:15:24] Bernardo Kastrup: I agree with you. I think that's the story from our point of view. We take ourselves very seriously because we think we are just this and not the rest. We are very invested in the apple blossom and not in the apple tree and the rest of life on Earth. I think it is valid for us to struggle through what you just explained. I do think, however, that even if we are always just locked into the frame of reference of the blossom, there is another point of view, independent of us, that takes the rest of the system into account. Because if you have a dissociation, you immediately have two alters. And the moment you have a boundary and you separate the inside from the outside, the outside is also an alter. Taking all life away, there is still a point of view, if analytic idealism is right, there is still the point of view of all the rest of the universe, which is a much broader point of view. From an evolutionary theory perspective, I think there is a way to empirically check whether that broader point of view is also an agent, a causally effective agent that is biased in some way. And the way to do that is very difficult because you simply don't have the data. What is interesting to see here would be if the neo-Darwinian idea that the genetic evolutions themselves are unbiased, they are random. Bias comes in only when you expose them to the environment and then fitness and natural selection kick in. It will impose a direction to the system, a gradient in the system that will favor fitness. So once natural selection plays in, you get a bias. But in the underlying genetic mutations, there should be no bias under neo-Darwinism. Now, can we run a randomness test in a raw set of genetic mutations to see if they're really biased or not. And we don't have the data. The fossil record does not keep the raw mutations. The ones that weren't viable probably disappeared. We'll never find them. However, in the past few years, there have been two fantastic papers. I think it's from Israel.
[1:17:54] Richard Watson: How do you live now?
[1:17:56] Bernardo Kastrup: About the malaria, the genes that create a positive response to malaria. So these papers claim to have shown that the mutations themselves are biased. And I think what that shows is precisely that other agent, the rest of the universe outside the living altars, even influences the living authors. It is certainly outside the human ego. And it is causally effective enough to manipulate raw genetic mutations and imprint a bias on it. So I think that is the best empirical hint or suggestion we have today that there is some form of built-in teleology in the fabric of nature. It may be instinctive, but it does have some feedback loop and it does make some kind of choice.
[1:18:59] Richard Watson: It would mean that the very tiny scales where things appear to be small and insignificant and stochastic, and the very large scales, the cosmic teleology, they're connected. You think the conventional story is that they're not connected, wherever that's going is not connected to what's happening down here. But if those very high frequencies and those very low frequencies were already harmonic, they were already talking to each other, then our experience in the middle would find strange coincidences like that. How come those parts were just the right parts that you needed for making that kind of a thing?
[1:19:39] Bernardo Kastrup: We have a fundamental epistemic limitation here. The part of science that looks at first principles is physics. Everybody else is looking at aggregate and compound phenomena.
[1:19:56] Richard Watson: Yeah.
[1:19:57] Bernardo Kastrup: In physics, to conclude anything empirically, we need to isolate the experimental conditions, separate the system from the environment. This is good methodology, but it comes with a price, which is that we eliminate from view all natural organizing principles that may kick in only at higher levels of complexity. In other words, fundamental organizing principles that aren't microscopic. Maybe there is a bias in nature for things that happen only at the scale of an entire organism or an entire society, or an entire galaxy cluster. Those correlations will then be impossible for us to see in a very structural, methodological sense. Because in our attempt to isolate the experimental conditions, we will reduce the scope of what we observe only to those organizing principles that manifest in that tiny scope. It will, by construction, eliminate everything else that may kick in only at higher levels of complexity or longer distances in space-time. So we may be methodologically precluding our own ability to recognize the feedback loops you just talked about, Richard, because they may kick in at a larger scale than we can investigate on the basis of first principles.
[1:21:27] Richard Watson: I think we need a way of thinking that's able to start in the middle, that's able to start at a particular scale, but it could be any scale. And from that scale, you can talk about how it pushes upwards and how it pushes downwards and whether those things are connected. You don't have to start at the bottom. You don't see what's going on at the other scales.
