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The Idea of The World
The Idea of The World
The Idea of The World
Bernardo Kastrup is a man with a mission. His mission is to persuade us that the current scientific
view of the world is wrong – seriously wrong. Reality is not what we have been told it is. It is not
fundamentally made up of material stuff despite the apparent evidence of our senses and the work of
scientists. No, reality is simply and only consciousness clothed in many and varied guises. Expressed
more formally, Kastrup argues against the prevalent philosophy of materialism or physicalism and
argues for the philosophy of idealism.
He comes well equipped and well qualified for his self-appointed mission. He has a PhD in Computer
Engineering and has worked as a research scientist at CERN, so he knows the physicalist paradigm
from the inside and in depth. From science he turned to philosophy and a second PhD for work on
ontology and the philosophy of mind. This unique combination of knowledge and experience has led
to many publications. The Idea of the World – subtitled ‘A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental
nature of reality’ [1] – bundles together ten articles by him which have previously been published in
academic journals spanning the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry and
physics between 2017 and 2018.
Conclusion
.
The Copernican revolution heralded a profound change in the way the world and the universe were
seen. What Kastrup seeks to achieve is if anything more radical. But finely argued as this book is,
how likely is it that the case for consciousness will ultimately be widely and generally accepted?
Well, look at it this way. We and the world must be made of something. If the choice is quarks or
consciousness, which should be chosen? Nobody has ever seen a quark but everyone has intimate
experience of consciousness.
And everybody dreams. We dream and in our dreams, landscapes appear filled with buildings, rooms,
trees, people… We walk in our dreams, touch a lover, smell a rose perhaps, and the ground does not
give way under our feet. When we awake we realise, that was a dream – those were not solid
buildings, not real people; the ‘space’ they filled was not space but simply an illusion which occupied
no space at all inside our head. True, but while we slept we did not question the dream world’s
validity: everything we experienced seemed real at the time. So we know that consciousness can
appear in phenomenal form. [6]
In terms of the overall impact of the book: there is much to be said for a mission that sets out to rescue
us from the emptiness and confusion of post-modernism – a mission which if successful could also
contribute to the tasks of solving global problems. Kastrup puts it well at the end: ‘Contemporary
culture is forgetting to read the letter for the sake of describing the envelope’ (p.237). We should be
grateful to him for the way he shows that the world should be regarded as an envelope; it is up to us,
not him, to read the letter.
The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality (2019) was
published by Iff Books in 2019.
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You can learn more about Bernardo Kastrup on his website www.bernardokastrup.com. Here you can
read his writings and essays as well as links to interviews with him. The extraordinary story of how
he moved from computer engineering to the ideas described here are recounted in his earlier
book, More the Allegory (Iff Books, 2016). His latest book is Decoding Schopenhauer’s
Metaphysics: The key to understanding how it solves the hard problem of consciousness and the
paradoxes of quantum mechanics (Iff Books, 2020).
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Others
[1] BERNARDO KASTRUP, The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental
nature of reality’ (Iff Books, 2019)
[2] For more on this, see Kastrup’s own web-site www.bernardokastrup.com
[3] DONALD HOFFMAN, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes,
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), p.77
[4] HOFFMAN, p.57
[5] Kastrup speaking on Patterson in Pursuit, Episode 98 (1 September 2019), particularly the ten
minutes starting around 25.00 minutes. Click here [/]
[6] See also BERNARDO KASTRUP, More the Allegory (Iff Books, 2016) Part III, particularly p.
189.
© Richard Gault