Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything by Bernardo Kastrup (PDF)

Description

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review Bernardo Kastrup’s book is another nail in the coffin of the superstition of materialism. With elegant clarity he explains that mind, brain & cosmos are what consciousness does.– Deepak Chopra, M.D., best-selling authorIt’s important that this message is widely disseminated.– Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., author of Science Set Free / The Science Delusion I challenge you to read Bernardo Kastrup’s prescription for what metaphysically ails you. You will be a wiser being for it. — Shogaku Zenshin Stephen Echard Musgrave Roshi, Director of the Zen Institute of San Diego, California. Bernardo Kastrup takes a bold and brilliant step in the collective movement of humanity beyond the confines of current materialism. — Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., author of ‘The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality.’ About the Author Bernardo Kastrup has a Ph.D. in philosophy and another in computer engineering. He has been a scientist in some of the world’s foremost scientific laboratories. His main interests are metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐That is the caption of a favorite comic of mine, entitled “The History of Man.” We are born, we live unconsciously in the midst of a dream, and, if we are in any way inclined toward wakefulness, we at some point are driven to wonder: just what the hell really IS going on here? In the comic, the wonderment expressed by the character is followed, wistfully, by “The End.” But for Bernardo Kastrup, this is the beginning of a deeply compelling journey of exploration and discovery.Kastrup bravely takes on the crushing weight of the established cultural worldview of materialism: that we are matter experiencing matter, through a consciousness that magically arises from the unconscious bricks of atoms, molecules and neurons. When those structures dissipate, so the materialist worldview goes, the consciousness it magically generates disappears into dust. There is no meaning inherent in matter. It just is. And it’s “out there.” Existing entirely independent of our conscious awareness of it.The hard problem of consciousness—how consciousness purportedly arises out of a combination of inanimate matter—is never adequately addressed by the materialist worldview. Further, in the process of building this worldview, all meaning and sacredness inherent in our experience of life is cast into the trash bin. Like so much useless junk. Woo woo imaginings, left to make way for the empty pursuit of the baubles materialism sustains make up the world—and ourselves.It is no wonder mankind is experiencing an unprecedented level of anxiety, depression and insanity. With the dominance of the materialist worldview, we have abandoned the very task our birth has set us upon: to seek the meaning of the metaphors represented by the things we experience.Thankfully, Kastrup offers us an alternative worldview: one that makes sense not only of our intuitive sense of reality, but which jibes much more logically with what has been revealed to us by the last century of breakthroughs in physics. We are mind. Everything is mind. We are experiencing mind itself, as self-reflected “whirlpools” or vibrating membranes. These are of course only metaphors for the one thing mind cannot directly experience: mind itself. But the experiences we are having—including the physical laws (physics), which appear to consistently govern the world we observe—are also metaphors for the deeper understanding of the great mind itself: the unifying consciousness, of which we are a self-reflecting part, our self reflection having obscured our experience of the greater whole. A whole that all of space, time, and that which exists beyond space and time consists of.Kastrup’s erudite musings on this world view turn out to be consistent with the discoveries of profound spiritual explorers throughout human history. And, ironically, they are more consistent with, and more logically explanatory of, the empirical and mathematical discoveries of the very science we have mistakenly taken to lead us away from this rich and profound understanding of who we are. Of what we are doing here. Of what the hell is going on.If you have ever found yourself suddenly overtaken by a profound sense of bizarreness—by a sense that the worldview embraced by the culture at large, as well as its intelligentsia, is somehow wrong and devoid of the profound meaning you sense with all you heart and mind are there behind the veil—this book is for you. Thank you Mr. Kastrup for having the courage and profound wisdom to bring your intellect to bear on these issues. May many listen and be persuaded to follow your lead into this great mystery.

⭐I begin this review with the admission that I was asked to write the Afterword to this book by the author. Despite my obvious bias I must take a stand in this book in Amazon, where these ideas are debated in public reviews and forums. “Materialism is Baloney” is a breezy title that belies the fact that this book is a serious philosophical endeavor. I believe William James, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Carl Jung, and the great Twentieth Century Philosopher of Human Conscious Transmutation, Jean Gebser might heartily endorse its cosmogony and its Hermetic appeal of “as above, so below”. Its ontological scope is both macroscopic (infinite) and microscopic ( the particular self conscious human).It is a book that I sincerely hope other neurophilosophers such as Colin McGinn, John Searles, Thomas Nagel and Owen Flanagan read. It certainly challenges the materialist mind as an emergent product of complex physical neurological layers of interacting systems and “squirts out” consciousness as an epiphenomenal “byproduct” like steam from a steam engine or spandrels forming under arches in a cathedral. Bernardo takes the much more parsimonious position, “…the brain is the image of a process of which mind limits and localizes the flow of its own contents”.Bernardo and I spent many hours co-pondering the vicissitudes of life and the demise of living in a current medical-scientific culture in which the human mind is equated with the complex wet chemistry of the brain encased in our cranium and extented throughout our bodies in the electro-chemical charges controlling our organs and sensory systems. According to materialists the brain may be “the most complex biological system known in the entire universe” but ultimately it is a result of random ribbons of “magically mutating ” self organizing DNA evolving over time in order to ensure in Richard Dawkin’s mind “selfishly replicating DNA” bent anthropomorphically on its own survival using the human body as its Frankenstein vehicle.Or as Daniel Dennet ‘s “Consciousness Explained” postulates; our self aware experience of “Being”, which incorporates language, art, mathematics, beauty, meaning, love, compassion, wonder, awe, and even scientific explanations for the “Big Bang” creation the very Universe that birthed us, are all based upon an illusion, a hall of mirrors, in which spinning electrons, complex molecules, “meaty” electro-chemically charged synapses firing between neurons somehow “squirt out” the illusion of direct, subjective experience. In other words infinitely large numbers of “objective things” randomly interacting over deep time somehow collate into human brains that produce the “illusion of interiority and subjectivity”. This somehow explains my raw experience of “I am”, the taste of crab bisque, the transcendent goose bumps when one hears Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” or in Shakespeare’s Tempest Prospero’s final speech to the audience after the actors have left the stage; Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.Bernardo’s ontology is human to the core. It is written from the absolute existential phenomenological position that all that any of us can ever be know ( self awareness, sensory perceptions, feelings, memories,science, mathematics, cosmology, medicine, philosophy, art, cosmic deep spiritual states, normal waking states) are all directly mediated by the transparent wholeness of Consciousness, the Ever-Present Origin of our Being.If the following quote from Sri Aurobindo, the early Twentieth Century Indian Philosopher and Mystic, resonate with your own deepest apprehended experience and intuition than I believe that you will find this book engrossing, touching both your Heart and Mind. Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence -it is the energy , the motion, the movement of consciousness that creates the universe and all that is in it – not only the macrocosm but the microcosm is nothing but consciousness arranging itself.This book is one of many opening “gambits” standing in the forefront of what many term a “third scientific revolution” in which quantum physics, invented over 100 years ago, is just beginning to reveal and verify both very old ontological and cosmological ideas and newer insights in physics and psychology gleaned from chaos theory, fractal mathematics, quantum non locality, observer effect, systems theory, and transpersonal psychologies.Rick Stuart

⭐I don’t write reviews. Indeed, I contribute very little to the internet, except when I feel necessary. I’ve shopped on amazon at least since 1999 and this is my first review. However, something needs to be said about this book, in-fact it should be shouted about.I have researched the consciousness/mind-body problem for 10 years – originally academically, but in recent times, fervently under the banner of a personal search. While of course Kastrup’s philosophical position is not new and has always been around in some form within the earliest of civilisation (Upanishads anyone?), his articulation and unpacking of the argument against a climate of metaphysical materialism, which has dominated since the 17th century, is perhaps unparalleled in contemporary philosophy. I have sought a book like this for some time.The importance of this book is in the accessibility and delivery of ideas, arguments and counterarguments therein. While WMIB is written as a popular reader, there are many academic books written by contemporary philosophers that do not deliver as clear an overview of the position and the precision of reason for why we should take idealism more seriously than any other position on the table. Kastrup is a welcome and very, very crucially needed thinker in modern times, belonging to a pantheon of thinkers that actually ‘got it’ amongst Adi Shankara to Berkley.While Adi Shankara was a contemplative, his Vedanta lineage required he be also a great intellectual, wielding nothing but surgical logic and reason to triumph in all his debates (dharma combat). And likewise, while there are many books on non-duality(monistic idealism) available for contemplative pointing out, there are few that unfold the intellectual framework necessary to really grasp or appreciate the position. There are even fewer, if any that I am aware, that address the vital stronghold and distortions of contemporary materialism which are so contrary to critical reasoning, and indeed, true skepticism.Kastrup, in full appreciation of the academic and cultural landscape, shows with unique precision and confidence of discernment why materialism, being the established default position of reason and skepticism, is nothing short of delusional. A mass unexamined delusion and institutionalised belief system, where scientific data evidently pointing to idealism is rejected and contorted because it does not fit into said belief system.It comes down to this, as philosopher of mind, Keith Frankish puts it; either consciousness is an illusion or physicalism/materialism is false. So entrenched is materialism that Frankish clings to orthodoxy and is thus an ‘illusionist’. A club whose members are Daniel Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, Susan Blackmore and the Churchlands to name but a few. This is the established position of ‘reason’ when it comes to consciousness.Frankish: “May I ask you a question, please? I don’t know what you think about physicalism, but suppose you had to reject either (a) your belief that you have experiences with phenomenal properties (in the standard sense) or (b) physicalism. Which would you choose? (I think we do face this choice.)”For Frankish and the other members of the club, the loss of physicalism/materialism is a “price is too high” and thus consciousness must be an illusion. A taster of Frankish’s illusionist position, where I reference Kastrup in my rebutting comment, can be found here: http://www.keithfrankish.com/2015/03/is-the-hard-problem-an-illusion/The current zeitgeist of Illusionism (you have to be an illusionist to be a materialist) tells us that experiences cannot have qualitative properties that are ineffable, intrinsic, private, and immediately apprehended.Frankish elaborates:…”qualia are supposed to be things to which experiencing subjects have unmediated access. But I just don’t see how a physical system could have unmediated access to features of the physical world. It sounds like magic. So either qualia (and perhaps subjects) aren’t physical or they are an illusion. From a physicalist perspective, the hard problem is not just hard, but impossible.”Materialists admit that your private experience of reading this very review, the private access to the thoughts that arise in response to it, is not possible under materialism. Either materialism or the immediate evidence of your private subjective experience must be for the chop. Guess which the faithful choose.With such confused thinking running the gamut in our education, culture, sciences, media and so on – like Adi Shankara in his time – a truly critical thinker such as Kastrup is essential in our time to once again set the record straight and expose the veneer of accepted rationality to be what it truly is; abhorrently irrational.WMIB needs to be read by all who are invested in such existential questions, personally and professionally. It would be a nice accompaniment to the established syllabus literature on idealism, giving clearer access, with modern refinement, to the often misunderstood idealist philosophers that have gone before. With a title as such however, it would be seen as heresy in modern academia. WMIB is the perfect retort you give to all Samuel Johnsons.Kastrup’s idealism is a fully realised idealism, fleshed out for the modern age, made immediate and showing that it is materialism which is the abstract and untenable.What other means other than consciousness, would a materialist have the self-evident, private access to his/her concepts that consciousness must be an illusion?We need thinkers like Kastrup.

⭐I struggled to finish this book and only endured to the bitter end because I did not want to review a book I hadn’t read.The author constructs multiple analogies for his idea, such as a whirlpool , and then elaborates the analogy at length with gay abandon, leaving the original ldea far behind. And then does it again with a different analogy. And again.At first I kept reading because I thought that we’d get past this, but at some point I realised that this was all there was in the book and gave up hope.

⭐The 19th C idealist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once asserted that the touchstone for any true philosophy is its compatibility with mysticism. If this assertion is to be believed then Mr Kastrup has done us a wonderful service by producing a philosophical account of idealism that harmonises well with the two main insights of mysticism, namely 1) the world is not what we think it is and 2) we’re not who/what we think we are. By a thorough dismantling of the current materialistic paradigm, a paradigm which seems to have a strangle hold on much current scientific thinking and society at large, Mr Kastrup clears the way for an ontological idealism which harmonises well with our intuitive experience of the world, as well as accounting for a much wider range of “anomalous” observations, from ESP, near-death-experiences, psychedelic experiences to the nature of consciousness itself, all of which are currently proving to be intractable from a strictly materialistic perspective. The goal of the book, as elucidated by Mr Kastrup, is to show that “much of what we are told to believe is based on unexamined and unjustified assumptions and biases, some of them preposterous” and to offer “a sane and simple alternative, to all available evidence and to your personal experience of reality.” No modest aim; but Mr Kastrup proves himself to be a worthy guide as he navigates us through some very abstruse concepts indeed; and does so in a manner that is both accessible and engaging.What follows is a brief summary guide of the chapters of the book. They serve as a general outline, to help you get a ‘feel’ for the ideas and concepts explored within the book, and should in no way be taken as substitutes for the sophisticated, erudite and nuanced arguments presented by Mr Kastrup himself.Chapter 1 entitled “The Current Worldview and its Implications”Mr Kastrup emphasises the importance that one’s worldview can have on how one leads one’s life, the choices one makes and the aspects of life one thereby considers important and worthy of attention. He laments that the worldview adopted by society, influencing people “through education, the media, and the overall cultural zeitgeist”, is that of materialism. He writes:”…there is a powerful core worldview that subtly pervades the deepest, often ‘subconscious’ levels of our minds, ultimately determining how we truly feel about ourselves and reality. This core worldview is materialism.” (p 8)He goes on to note how the materialistic worldview has become a mechanism for social validation, primarily through its adoption by the intellectual elite, causing us to calibrate our beliefs and opinions by reference to the consensus viewpoint of this reigning elite. Over-represented amongst this intellectual elite are scientists and Mr Kastrup excoriates those scientists who, through a “dangerous combination of ignorance and hubris”, believe “science alone can replace philosophy”. He writes:”They have failed to see that the ability to predict how things behave with respect to one another says little about what things fundamentally are.” (p 12)After a brief discussion of just what is meant by materialism i.e. that “reality exists outside your mind in the form of assemblies of material particles occupying the framework of space and time”, Mr Kastrup then goes on to reveal one of the more intractable problems of the materialistic paradigm, namely “the hard problem of consciousness”, and how attempts to reconcile materialism with the “hard problem” lead to such unsatisfactory solutions as “animism/panpsychism”. Also, materialistic neuroscience gives rise to the notion that everything we experience is a “brain generated ‘hallucination’ analogous in nearly every way to a dream.” Kastrup writes:”According to materialism, what we experience in our lives every day is not reality as such, but a kind of brain-constructed ‘copy’ of reality…The outside, ‘real world’ of materialism is supposedly an amorphous, colourless, oderless, soundless, tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience. It’s supposedly more akin to a mathematical equation than to anything concrete.” (p 21)Can we trust such an hallucination? Echoing Kant, Mr Kastrup asserts…”…there is no strong reason to believe that the ‘copy’ of reality you and I supposedly live in comes even close to what is really going on. Thus, the implication of materialism is that we’re intrinsically limited to watching an edited and biased version of the film we’re trying to make sense of. Yet, we derive materialism entirely from that very film!” (p 23)Thus Mr Kastrup concludes that materialism is not the “intuitive and self-evident worldview” it seems to be. But “before we can throw out materialism, we need a coherent alternative to explain empirical reality.” The remainder of the book is Mr Kastrup’s attempt to do just that.Chapter 2 entitled “Tackling the Mind-body Problem”.After a brief overview of contemporary neuroscience and the evident correlations between mind states and brain states, Mr Kastrup elucidates the orthodox materialistic attempts to explain (explain away?) consciousness and the mind-body problem. Finding the materialistic hypotheses to be inadequate he proffers his own hypothesis by positing consciousness to be an ‘ontological primitive’, which is to say, “an irreducible aspect of nature that can’t itself be explained but must, instead, be accepted to exist”. Referencing research that seemingly indicates that “no physical phenomena can be explained separately from, or independently of, its subjective apprehension in consciousness” Mr Kastrup logically concludes from such research that “consciousness cannot be reduced to matter – for it appears that it is needed for matter to exist in the first place.”If consciousness is fundamental it cannot be the case that the brain ‘generates’ consciousness; rather, the brain acts a ‘modulator’ and ‘localizer’ of consciousness, restricting conscious perception to a specific mind-body organism with a consequent “filtering out of consciousness anything that is not correlated with the body’s perspective.” Mr Kastrup then uses this “filter hypothesis” to make certain predictions and provides a substantial body of empirical evidence in support of this hypothesis.Chapter 3 entitles “Mind as the Medium of Reality”For those readers coming to this topic for the first time, conditioned by and enmeshed within a materialistic worldview, this chapter may prove to be a significant hurdle as Mr Kastrup outlines for the reader the implications of the metaphysic of “Idealism”, which he defines as “Reality consists exclusively of mind and its contents”. This is in contradistinction to “Realism” which is the notion that “Reality exists outside and independent of mind.” If idealism seems illogical and absurd it is simply because “you are just not used to it.” Despite the “intuitive appeal of materialism” philosophy must build upon a foundation of certainty and the only certainty we have, argues Kastrup, is “right under our noses: experience itself. Postulating an entire ‘shadow’ universe outside experience is only justifiable if we cannot make sense of reality without it.” He writes:”All materialist ideas about nature and reality are products of mind and exist solely in mind. All things that are believed to exist outside and independently of mind – your body and brain included – are themselves, as far as we can ever know for sure, images in, and abstractions of, mind.” (p 53)Mr Kastrup builds a compelling argument for idealism by examining the key implications, the empirical evidence and support, as well as the logical implications of idealism. This will be a difficult chapter for many, but the effort invested will be more than rewarded in subsequent chapters.Chapter 4 entitled “The Brain as a Knot of Mind”In this chapter Mr Kastrup sets out to reconcile the philosophy of idealism with the ‘filter hypothesis’ of chapter 2. As with all metaphors, the filter model has limitations, the main one being, “if the brain itself exists in mind, how can it filter that which gives it its very existence?” In an attempt to overcome this limitation, Mr Kastrup invokes a further metaphor of a whirlpool. Just as a whirlpool localizes water in a stream, yet all the time remaining as water, analogously the brain is a localization of mind whilst remaining mind. “Instead of magically generating mind, the brain simply is the partial image of mind in the process of self-localizing.” And, just as a whirlpool is not separate from the stream, so “the body – as part of the universe and, thus, also a content of mind – is not separate from the mind at large.” The whirlpool metaphor can also be extended to account for the fact that we experience the same world:”According to the whirlpool metaphor, what we normally think of as the ‘external world’ is global undulations propagating through the broader stream of mind, which penetrate our respective whirlpools through the entry-points we call our sense organs…The reason we seem to share the same reality is that these undulations, like waves spreading in multiple directions, penetrate multiple whirlpools concurrently, injecting the same – or similar – information into each of them.” (p 96)Mr Kastrup, realising how “ingrained in our thinking materialism has become” enjoins the reader, towards the end of this chapter, to reflect deeply on the consequences of the idealistic metaphysic. While acknowledging the shortcomings in the whirlpool metaphor, Mr Kastrup feels confident that “the intuitive appeal of materialism is based on a kind of perverse intellectual game of steal-and-switch: our culture mistakenly attributes to materialism the intuitiveness of idealism, while attributing to idealism the absurdity of materialism. Go figure.”Chapter 5 entitled “A Mercurial Metaphor”Mr Kastrup opens this chapter by highlighting a weakness in the whirlpool metaphor, namely, “…if all reality is a set of experiences flowing in the one mind, why do the localized points-of-view corresponding to each whirlpool ‘forget’ everything outside their respective whirlpools?…Since all experiences are in one and the same mind, the whirlpool metaphor entails that we should all, in principle, have a form of extrasensory perception – qualitatively different from perception through the sense organs – of all experiences flowing in the broader stream.” The question, succinctly put, is “How can an individual’s psyche – merely a localized point-of-view of the broad medium of mind – become seemingly disconnected form other experiences unfolding in the very mind it is a pert of?” This question is the jumping off point of Mr Kastrup’s speculations on the nature of self-reflective egoic awareness, the personal and collective unconscious and the nature of memory. I would be guilty of a great injustice if I tried to encapsulate in a few words the compelling reasoning and arguments Mr Kastrup uses in support of his speculations are contrary to much orthodox thought, not least of which are his ideas concerning the nature of the unconscious; suffice to say, Mr Kastrup refers to a number of empirical experiments in support of his claims as well as introducing the reader to some interesting speculations regarding the nature of ‘truth’.Chapter 6 entitled “The Oscillating Membrane Metaphor.”The methodology employed by Mr Kastrup, in attempting to communicate his ideas, is through a process of ever more sophisticated metaphors that build, one upon the other, into a self-sustaining and coherent structure. Mr Kastrup writes:”Any metaphor that seeks to provide images in terms of which one could make sense of mind and reality must have enough degrees of freedom to capture all this rich variety…a metaphor for mind and reality should be able to fully capture the patterns and regularities of nature as currently understood by physics.” (p 132)In order to “have enough degrees of freedom” this chapter introduces the notion of “vibrations” interacting with an “elastic membrane”. Mr Kastrup writes:”…we need to imagine the medium of mind as a membrane with more than two dimensions vibrating in more than three dimensions of space. Only then can we get enough degrees of freedom to represent all of human experience.” (p 139)This vibrating elastic membrane metaphor is used to discuss how egos form and “gain access to a shared, collective, apparently external reality.”This is the longest and most difficult chapter of the book. A great deal of ground is covered, old themes are revisited – such as the collective unconscious and the filter model of consciousness – seeming paradoxes are resolved and issues such as free will and ego transcendence discussed.Chapter 7 entitled “Re-interpreting Reality”Mr Kastrup applies the world-view of ontological idealism to such concerns as cosmological origins and history…”If all reality is in the mind, does it still make sense to speak of a cosmological past and a Big Bang?” (p 171)…the possible nature of the soul and life after death…”If the body is an image of a process of consciousness localization, then when that process stops the image should disappear, just like the whirlpool…The body doesn’t disappear instantly, like the whirlpool does. How come?” (p 177)… non-ordinary states of consciousness…”Can we somehow alter our psychic structures so less of reality is filtered out? Can we somehow partially and temporarily de-localize our consciousness in order to transcend ordinary space and time constraints?” (p 180)…ghosts and apparitions…”Under the worldview developed in this book, such a conception of ghosts is difficult – if at all possible – to support.” (speaking here of “quasi-physical entities that can interact with matter.”) (p 185)… parallel realities…”It is thus conceivable that there are ego-capable beings whose psychic structures are so different from ours that no pattern of vibration of the broadest membrane could resonate with their and our psychic structures…For all practical purposes, these beings would not occupy the same space-time that we do. In effect, we would be living in parallel realities.” (p 188)A short section is devoted to the seemingly non-materialistic outlook of traditional cultures. Aldous Huxley, in Appendix II of his Heaven and Hell, outlined his belief that nutritional deficiencies in such cultures, with attendant affects on brain chemistry, made them more susceptible to “visions” and “material” flowing into consciousness from ‘out there’, in Mind-at-large. Similarly, Mr Kastrup invokes this idea as an explanation as to why traditional peoples base entire cultures and societies on beliefs “that have never had any empirical basis on reality.”There is a great deal of speculation in this chapter, as Mr Kastrup himself concedes, and I can imagine there will be many who take issue with his assumptions; notwithstanding, it cannot be denied that Mr Kastrup puts forward his arguments in a clear, cogent, rational and logical way and tackles potential objections to his thesis head on.Chapter 8 entitled “Final Musings”The final chapter is an overview, summary, and a kind of “personal critique of the rest of the book.” Revisiting some of the main concepts, Mr Kastrup attempts to show how the worldview of ontological idealism “relates to the present state of our culture.” For instance, while acknowledging its usefulness as an “easier-to-digest metaphor for idealist truths”, Mr Kastrup laments the fact that substance dualism is the “only mainstream alternative” to materialism, writing: “Matter and soul are seen to be different and separate types of ‘stuff’, irreducible to one another…This polarization of the metaphysical debate between materialism and substance dualism is a cultural victory for materialism.”By outlining certain “correspondences” between substance dualism and idealism, Mr Kastrup considers it “fair to use dualist metaphors when one talks about the fundamental nature of reality and human identity…In a strong sense, things work as though people had souls, separate from the body and the rest of the world, which survived physical death.”But just what is it that survives physical death according to this model of ontological idealism? Here Mr Kastrup makes a distinction separating the ego from the “sense of ‘I’ that underlies all of our experiences.” The ego is a collection of memories, experiences, desires, attachments, feelings etc which all serve to build a narrative we call ‘me’; whereas the ‘I’, the witness of this narrative, is “distributed throughout the membrane and is inherent to experience” but mistakenly believes itself to be the ego, the mind created story we call ‘self’. This ‘I’, this inner awareness, this sense of “I AM” before it contracts and becomes identified with the story of ‘self’, is “entirely undifferentiated and identical in every person…This undressed, naked, ‘amorphous I’ is inherent to the membrane of mind at large, the sole subject of existence…And here is the key point: the metaphysics developed in this book implies that there is an uninterrupted preservation of the ‘amorphous I’ throughout the process we call death.” Mr Kastrup writes:”Let there be no ambiguity here: it is a direct and unavoidable implication of my worldview that your consciousness – your subjective experience of being, right now – will survive your bodily death.” (p 201)We then move on to address materialist assumptions and intuitions and how materialists, as a consequence of such assumptions, back themselves into a metaphysical cul-de-sac, forced by their allegiance to materialism to draw some pretty absurd conclusions about the nature of the mind and reality.Mr Kastrup briefly explores the possibility of their being a universal telos, a grand purpose, behind existence, before concluding this chapter with a few closing remarks concerning the inevitability of invoking metaphorical language to help us think about the nature of reality. Mr Kastrup acknowledges the limitations of his own metaphors in his attempts to elucidate the worldview of ontological realism, but concludes:”What I do believe is that the worldview discussed here is a concrete and sound step forward when compared to the reigning paradigm. As I hope to have demonstrated, it explains all aspects of reality that materialism claims to explain, and then many more…Let us be honest: the fairytale of materialism has served a valid purpose during a more naive and childish age, but has now far outlived its usefulness.” (p 214 – 215)Final ThoughtsAs far back as 1912 Bertrand Russell wrote in The Problems of Philosophy: “…common sense leaves us completely in the dark as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects, and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes us as strange. The truth about physical objects must be strange.”Mr Kastrup has added his unique voice to the large (and ever growing) chorus of voices extolling the rationale of ontological idealism. His book is written in a jargon-free, easy and accessible style. However, for those unfamiliar with idealism, many of the chapters may need revisiting a few times before certain concepts become clear. His book is a welcome contribution to the already extensive library of books dealing with this topic and has every claim to be considered amongst the best of them. “Why Materialism is Baloney” will also serve as a good introduction to more abstruse works dealing with the philosophy of idealism, such as Schopenhauer’s notoriously difficult “The World as Will and Representaion” from the Western philosophical tradition, as well as less familiar Eastern traditions of idealism such as Advaita Vedanta belonging to the Hindu tradition, also the Buddhist schools of Madhyamika and Yogacara, which all have much to say regarding the reality status of the world.This is a book that deserves a wide readership. My one fear is that those who would benefit the most from reading it (i.e. radical materialists) will give it a wide berth, not least because of the front cover endorsement by Deepak Chopra, a man for whom the radical materialist community holds such a vehement animus that any book bearing his name is fit for no other fate than that of a good ol’ fashioned book burning. This is a shame. My hope is that many materialists will read this book and hopefully break free from the narrow, circumscribed, constricted, and ultimately constricting, worldview of materialism. Thank you Mr Kastrup for your substantial contribution to the realisation of this hope.

⭐I’m only into Chapter 2 so far, but wondering whether to continue. While my own experience lends me to wanting this book to be good I’m trying to read it critically – there’s no point in just reading it for agreement ‘cos I already know what _I_ think!Chapter 1 p17: he argues that the “properties of subjective experience … should be deducible from the mass, momentum, spin, charge, or any other property of sub-atomic particles bouncing around in the brain” just like the shape of sand ripples are deducible from the properties of grains of sand and wind. Surely he’s not comparing like with like: in terms of what might be described as “emergent properties of layers of systems-of-systems” (e.g. Capra et al) the sand example relates more to “adjacent layers”, whereas the brain example would seem to be many many levels of abstraction apart.Chapter 2: p34: he’s talking about Near-Death Experiences, and a major (“specifically”) argument against materialists is that they require some hidden neural activity in an apparently ‘dead’ brain for NDE to occur. But there is no real evidence of this ‘dead’ brain NDE – well-known examples (e.g. Pam Reynolds) clearly are unable to establish wether the NDE occurs during amnesia or during a period of zero measured brain activity. Consequently BK’s chosen argument is specious, even if materialists were really to argue NDEs in this way….I’ll carry on a bit, and come back to update this review if it turns out I’ve been unfairEDIT:Page 35 now, and BK is discussing Tononi’s Information Integration Theory (IIT). I think he’s being disingenuous, and a little snide perhaps, when he talks about “a neural process suddenly becomes conscious … Why does _sufficient_ (BK’s italics) information integration lead to … consciousness?” In the IIT project’s own view the IIT axioms are necessary, but not sufficient, for consciousness to arise so that they themselves recognise that IIT isn’t providing a mechanistic explanation of consciousness. But the problem for me is that BK surely knows this, yet continues with his strawman argument intentionally using the word “sufficient”P39: “Materialism attempts to reduce conscious experience to physical entities like these (subatomic) particles. As such, it assumes consciousness to be derivative, not fundamental”. Is this a false dilemma, with BK seeming to ignore the idea of emergent properties of a system. Surely it would be quite an undertaking to predict the properties – taste, smell, colour, of a piece of cheese – from a handful of quarks, yet here is BK framing the materialist pov in that way.OK, so I get that just a few pages into the book BK is laying out the arguments of materialism before going on to the real meat of his own solutions, but strawmen, persistent misrepresentation… IANAP and not too smart, so how can I possibly trust any later arguments he might make?EDIT 2: So finally getting on to BK’s ‘own’ material, after hacking through his misrepresentation of the realist/materialist position, and I’m finding it really very good: he’s using analogies, rather than direct pointers, but that’s OK since a part of his thesis is actually that the brain/body doesn’t have to be a precise/accurate filter of mind/reality. At this point I think he has an explanatory gap at least as big as the materialists, and I’m not convinced by his claim to have done away with the hard problem. But on the basis of about half the book I’m upping the review to 3 stars.EDIT 3: Finished the book now. For me there were at least 3 big insight moments which have shifted my worldview in (I think) a very valuable way. For that I’d recommend it. It’s a shame the early chapters provide a strawman takedown of materialism since the later ones are so much better,

⭐I really can’t praise this book highly enough. It is one of those few books that really become an important influence and then part of your life and if I could give it ten stars, I would.Kastrup clearly, eruditely, succinctly, intelligently outlines why the position of scientific materialism- so dominant in our scientific establishment and wider culture- is an emperor with no clothes, and not the evidence-based, factual account [grounded deep within the modern scientific method] of the form of the universe it purports to be. It is in effect, little more than a metaphysical ideology based on assumptions and pre-conceptions, and one that in effect punches way above it’s weight, largely due to historical reasons.Kastrup’s dismantling of the Materialist position is not all there is to enjoy here though as he deals with that in the first few chapters with ruthless efficiency. The real strength of this book is in the chapters where he then goes on to outline how the universe, through the machinations of a fundamental element of Mind, operates and develops and what our place as human beings is within the wonders of that cosmic process. The way he does this, through metaphor and analogy carefully, clearly built up layer by layer, is a great accomplishment and has helped to clarify many of my own intellectual and ‘spiritual’ issues immensely.This book is a gem that deserves to be widely read. It should in an ideal world be sat on top of the NY times bestseller list for months. I know I will be returning to it again and again in the years ahead. Don’t say this very often in a review, but this book is a triumph.

Keywords

Free Download Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything in PDF format
Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything PDF Free Download
Download Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything 2014 PDF Free
Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything 2014 PDF Free Download
Download Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything PDF
Free Download Ebook Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything