Okay nice conversation and all but unfortunately just "Bernardo 101 territory"...wish it could have done more than literally cover the exact same things featured on 99% of Bernardo appearances elsewhere. I really don't understand this mindset; didn't mention "high strangeness" until ten minutes left to the discussion...what's the point of covering literally the same ground as everyone else??? It's like the Subway sandwich franchise allowing locations to open up within a few hundred feet of one another....
Makes me wonder, too, about the purpose of all this nonstop dissociation; why would Mind-at-Large keep iterating new people when our psychology has not basically changed for tens of thousands of years?? Okay so Cosmic Consciousness is outside of time and wouldn't look at whatever it's doing in terms of "efficiency" but so again whatever could possibly be going on with all this crap???
The funny thing is that it appears we'll all find out after death -- and we may not like The Answer...!
The matter of survival -- of most effectively and efficiently maintaining this dissociative boundary -- is a most interesting one...because for all the effectiveness and efficiency, life is still really damned hard!
Like, modern life is hard enough but Goodness Gracious when you read about how the Stone Age hunter-gatherers still around all over the world live, it really makes you wonder.
So what's it all mean, as actor Michael Caine's autobiography is titled?
Because all this dissociation -- all this life -- is just "Cosmic Consciousness" playing peekaboo with itself...but why?? So much drama, such storm and stress; tale told by an idiot indeed.
Indeed, natural selection makes ass-kissers and cock-suckers of us all. But for what purpose???
Trump's been elected again. Dude is clearly unqualified but it doesn't matter since he's clearly what The People want! And what is it they want?
Thanks to Bernardo (thanks, Bernardo) I actually really do fear death now. Life's not all that pleasant and it seems like this is just a nursery here!
Okay, so the real meat starts at 40:14 -- everything before is Basic Bernardo, Bernardo 101 (and still fairly rushed despite consuming a solid majority of the interview's runtime) -- despite the disclaimer that the natural is so much more fascinating than the supernatural!
(Which I do very much understand and why I wish folks would ask about what sleep is [as a "representation" in Analytic Idealism], why there are different personalities [again in terms of Analytic Idealism and not simply biology or psychology], what "really" could possibly be represented in "the world out there" by feces...et cetera; what new ways of looking at and understanding such things could Analytic Idealism bring??)
Oops -- jumped the gun there! It's actually still "Bernardo for Beginners" until 44:47; doesn't even begin to start getting paranormal (and "Intermediate Bernardo" or "Bernardo 201") 'til then!
BTW, "Advanced Bernardo" or "Bernardo 301" would be, for example, asking why there's no such thing as perfection...why does entropy exist...and since very strictly speaking as per Niels Bohr there are no laws of physics as such but merely our perceptions or representations which dovetails exactly with Bernardo's book on high strangeness wherein he surmises how discredited scientific notions such as the aether may actually have been true at one point, only to change in fact alongside changing perceptions, what precisely is it that causes the changed representations "in" us such that we perceive new "laws" of nature contradicting old ones???
(And in this taxonomy, "Bernardo 401," "Seminar Bernardo," or "Postgrad Bernardo" would be "is it just a matter of time until perfection?" "Is time only a byproduct, however integral otherwise, of this state of dissociation?" "What caused all this dissociation in the first place?" "Will there ever be eternal cessation of dissociation?" "Why would/could dissociation not result in an Everett/Many Worlds situation of minute particle-level differences between wildly numerous dissociative permutations?????" [After all it's just math and by logic with infinite time everything will eventually happen.])
Ah, more intellectual sleight-of-hand from Bernardo, as I call it: He is overly found of asking rhetorical questions such as "what is the length in centimeters of your thought" as he does here but of course thoughts are not things that have lengths, after all (unless he asks the more intellectually honest question "what is the duration in seconds of your thought")...might as well ask (to play with rhetoric he has employed elsewhere in a related context) what's the sex of the number 69!
Plus his own relatively newfound respect for Integrated Information Theory should retire such pedagogy, given that IIT's ambition is precisely to map out -- that is, quantify -- consciousness and thus thought!
Fourth thing: Bernardo doesn't seem realize that he needn't argue about materialism through First Principles since that's simply about your Principles or axioms and of course you can successfully argue literally anything at all depending on the axioms you use -- which is why perfectly valid mathematics can and do exist even though they have absolutely nothing to do with the real world!!
Well he knows all that of course but evidently feels it's best to meet people's most natural and frequent protests, which are entirely founded on materialism...but the tactic of invalidating materialism on historical and then logical grounds is just misleading (for reasons I've outlined in previous commentary) and actually unnecessary; he can simply answer people's materialist rebuttals without trying to overstate his case through possibly dubious historical claims and clearly erroneous logical ones (again, namely, presupposing his own view as the basis on which others are invalidated).
I am actually an idealist like him, too -- in fact, one of his very own Analytic Idealists! I accept Bernardo's ontology and only quibble with some of his pedagogy...but I do not share his contempt for other views and so do not feel it necessary to strawman or, as he also does on a few occasions, sea-lion them.
Instead of attempting a take-down of materialism on First Principles which again is simply impossible, a much more useful pedagogy would be to adopt his fellow idealist Donald Hoffman's desktop metaphor (his own very similar windowless-airplane version is quite adequate but not as intuitively enlightening).
Third thing that strikes me: Bernardo's intellectual sleight-of-hand.
I don't mean that he's dishonest; indeed, he falls victim himself to his own quick sloppy leap in reasoning: He misunderstands Descartes to agree with him that consciousness is axiomatic but what Descartes's actually saying is that he can only be sure of his own existence through Reason, which then allows him to further posit the existence of others...and ultimately the material basis of the world in which all consciousnesses exist.
So it's not that Descartes and Bernardo proceed from the same starting point regarding consciousness and then Descartes made a mistake by veering off into materialism (incidentally, Descartes is better described as a Dualist and not a perfect or absolute Materialist) but that he simply proceeds from noting his own existence to be unquestionable and thus fundamental or axiomatic and then notes that it is Reason which affords him such knowledge -- and trusting the operations of that very same Reason he therefore deduces the materialism of the world (but does allow that the soul is not physical or material and that's why he is more properly considered a Dualist).
Very minor point of contention but this is a mental habit of Bernardo's to so easily conflate subtle nuances in the service of validating some of his claims. Materialism certainly seems wrong given the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics but not on the First Principles basis Bernardo makes here....
BTW it's just occurred to me that, aside from the human nature we all share (viz., "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Kahneman), Bernardo's "mental habit" may be due to the way he'd acquired his second PhD, the one in Philosophy; instead of undergoing the normal course of studies, he was allowed to substitute his own existing published work such as that in "Scientific American" so having never been through standard formal training he is a bit less careful in his reasoning...here he is ascribing logical fallacy to materialism on the basis of presupposing his own idealism instead of actually critiquing materialism from within materialism (which is the only way a charge of logical fallacy can be sustained at all; the logic must be found wanting from within the perspective being charged).
And I determine such a style of reasoning to be habitual since he does it again right away when he claims abstractions like length and weight are not considered experiential in materialism -- which is just false...such abstractions are indeed mere labels or symbols but the experiences they stand for or point to do indeed have, according to materialism, a material basis or ontology.
The reason for the labels is clear; it's entirely functional and nothing to do with any sort of metaphysical prejudice. What materialism purports to explain is the ontological basis for experiences and just things in general; it does not try to deny the existence of experience.
Now Bernardo would probably rebut that he's not claiming that materialism denies the existence of experiences but then why bring up any of that within the context of invalidating materialism?? Hence I say that he's a victim of his own intellectual sleight-of-hand which may have something to do with his abbreviated training in philosophy.
Hmm, second thing that struck me is Bernardo very breezily ascribing physicalism (philosophical materialism) to late-nineteenth century class struggle...!
I think he's grasping at straws with that one, constructing an interesting solution for a problem that doesn't actually exist; Bernardo wants people to believe that philosophical idealism was the societal norm until relatively recently but that's quite a stretch given how natural it is to take everything at face value -- indeed, that's the logic behind the universal appeal of peekaboo for babies: They are greatly amused by the now-you-see-me/now-you-don't precisely because they are such natural literalists. Indeed, that's the whole point of humor, the intellectually ticklish contrasts between context and subtext!
So if anything it's not that we've only rather lately become physicalists or materialists but that we struggle still to outgrow our innate grounding in such perceptions. But yes it's certainly quite amusing for B. to declare materialism bougie LOL
Hmmm...the first thing that struck me is how simplistic a notion Bernardo has of economics -- despite him having been a senior executive at ASML! -- that succeeding at AI would free up people to take up philosophy but for "corporate greed!"
The premise behind that sentiment is so naïve (he obviously doesn't recognize the real role of money in a complex society, never mind what money actually is) that it reminded me of how folks can be so brilliant in some areas while so totally ignorant in others...!
No, unless we get replicator technology like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, there is just no getting away from money and the "need" to "earn" it...the matter of work is ancient and deep and unfortunately not only a matter of freeing up more and more people from the most menial forms of it....
Okay nice conversation and all but unfortunately just "Bernardo 101 territory"...wish it could have done more than literally cover the exact same things featured on 99% of Bernardo appearances elsewhere. I really don't understand this mindset; didn't mention "high strangeness" until ten minutes left to the discussion...what's the point of covering literally the same ground as everyone else??? It's like the Subway sandwich franchise allowing locations to open up within a few hundred feet of one another....
Makes me wonder, too, about the purpose of all this nonstop dissociation; why would Mind-at-Large keep iterating new people when our psychology has not basically changed for tens of thousands of years?? Okay so Cosmic Consciousness is outside of time and wouldn't look at whatever it's doing in terms of "efficiency" but so again whatever could possibly be going on with all this crap???
The funny thing is that it appears we'll all find out after death -- and we may not like The Answer...!
The matter of survival -- of most effectively and efficiently maintaining this dissociative boundary -- is a most interesting one...because for all the effectiveness and efficiency, life is still really damned hard!
Like, modern life is hard enough but Goodness Gracious when you read about how the Stone Age hunter-gatherers still around all over the world live, it really makes you wonder.
So what's it all mean, as actor Michael Caine's autobiography is titled?
Because all this dissociation -- all this life -- is just "Cosmic Consciousness" playing peekaboo with itself...but why?? So much drama, such storm and stress; tale told by an idiot indeed.
Indeed, natural selection makes ass-kissers and cock-suckers of us all. But for what purpose???
Trump's been elected again. Dude is clearly unqualified but it doesn't matter since he's clearly what The People want! And what is it they want?
Thanks to Bernardo (thanks, Bernardo) I actually really do fear death now. Life's not all that pleasant and it seems like this is just a nursery here!
Okay, so the real meat starts at 40:14 -- everything before is Basic Bernardo, Bernardo 101 (and still fairly rushed despite consuming a solid majority of the interview's runtime) -- despite the disclaimer that the natural is so much more fascinating than the supernatural!
(Which I do very much understand and why I wish folks would ask about what sleep is [as a "representation" in Analytic Idealism], why there are different personalities [again in terms of Analytic Idealism and not simply biology or psychology], what "really" could possibly be represented in "the world out there" by feces...et cetera; what new ways of looking at and understanding such things could Analytic Idealism bring??)
Oops -- jumped the gun there! It's actually still "Bernardo for Beginners" until 44:47; doesn't even begin to start getting paranormal (and "Intermediate Bernardo" or "Bernardo 201") 'til then!
BTW, "Advanced Bernardo" or "Bernardo 301" would be, for example, asking why there's no such thing as perfection...why does entropy exist...and since very strictly speaking as per Niels Bohr there are no laws of physics as such but merely our perceptions or representations which dovetails exactly with Bernardo's book on high strangeness wherein he surmises how discredited scientific notions such as the aether may actually have been true at one point, only to change in fact alongside changing perceptions, what precisely is it that causes the changed representations "in" us such that we perceive new "laws" of nature contradicting old ones???
(And in this taxonomy, "Bernardo 401," "Seminar Bernardo," or "Postgrad Bernardo" would be "is it just a matter of time until perfection?" "Is time only a byproduct, however integral otherwise, of this state of dissociation?" "What caused all this dissociation in the first place?" "Will there ever be eternal cessation of dissociation?" "Why would/could dissociation not result in an Everett/Many Worlds situation of minute particle-level differences between wildly numerous dissociative permutations?????" [After all it's just math and by logic with infinite time everything will eventually happen.])
Ah, more intellectual sleight-of-hand from Bernardo, as I call it: He is overly found of asking rhetorical questions such as "what is the length in centimeters of your thought" as he does here but of course thoughts are not things that have lengths, after all (unless he asks the more intellectually honest question "what is the duration in seconds of your thought")...might as well ask (to play with rhetoric he has employed elsewhere in a related context) what's the sex of the number 69!
Plus his own relatively newfound respect for Integrated Information Theory should retire such pedagogy, given that IIT's ambition is precisely to map out -- that is, quantify -- consciousness and thus thought!
Fourth thing: Bernardo doesn't seem realize that he needn't argue about materialism through First Principles since that's simply about your Principles or axioms and of course you can successfully argue literally anything at all depending on the axioms you use -- which is why perfectly valid mathematics can and do exist even though they have absolutely nothing to do with the real world!!
Well he knows all that of course but evidently feels it's best to meet people's most natural and frequent protests, which are entirely founded on materialism...but the tactic of invalidating materialism on historical and then logical grounds is just misleading (for reasons I've outlined in previous commentary) and actually unnecessary; he can simply answer people's materialist rebuttals without trying to overstate his case through possibly dubious historical claims and clearly erroneous logical ones (again, namely, presupposing his own view as the basis on which others are invalidated).
I am actually an idealist like him, too -- in fact, one of his very own Analytic Idealists! I accept Bernardo's ontology and only quibble with some of his pedagogy...but I do not share his contempt for other views and so do not feel it necessary to strawman or, as he also does on a few occasions, sea-lion them.
Instead of attempting a take-down of materialism on First Principles which again is simply impossible, a much more useful pedagogy would be to adopt his fellow idealist Donald Hoffman's desktop metaphor (his own very similar windowless-airplane version is quite adequate but not as intuitively enlightening).
Third thing that strikes me: Bernardo's intellectual sleight-of-hand.
I don't mean that he's dishonest; indeed, he falls victim himself to his own quick sloppy leap in reasoning: He misunderstands Descartes to agree with him that consciousness is axiomatic but what Descartes's actually saying is that he can only be sure of his own existence through Reason, which then allows him to further posit the existence of others...and ultimately the material basis of the world in which all consciousnesses exist.
So it's not that Descartes and Bernardo proceed from the same starting point regarding consciousness and then Descartes made a mistake by veering off into materialism (incidentally, Descartes is better described as a Dualist and not a perfect or absolute Materialist) but that he simply proceeds from noting his own existence to be unquestionable and thus fundamental or axiomatic and then notes that it is Reason which affords him such knowledge -- and trusting the operations of that very same Reason he therefore deduces the materialism of the world (but does allow that the soul is not physical or material and that's why he is more properly considered a Dualist).
Very minor point of contention but this is a mental habit of Bernardo's to so easily conflate subtle nuances in the service of validating some of his claims. Materialism certainly seems wrong given the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics but not on the First Principles basis Bernardo makes here....
BTW it's just occurred to me that, aside from the human nature we all share (viz., "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Kahneman), Bernardo's "mental habit" may be due to the way he'd acquired his second PhD, the one in Philosophy; instead of undergoing the normal course of studies, he was allowed to substitute his own existing published work such as that in "Scientific American" so having never been through standard formal training he is a bit less careful in his reasoning...here he is ascribing logical fallacy to materialism on the basis of presupposing his own idealism instead of actually critiquing materialism from within materialism (which is the only way a charge of logical fallacy can be sustained at all; the logic must be found wanting from within the perspective being charged).
And I determine such a style of reasoning to be habitual since he does it again right away when he claims abstractions like length and weight are not considered experiential in materialism -- which is just false...such abstractions are indeed mere labels or symbols but the experiences they stand for or point to do indeed have, according to materialism, a material basis or ontology.
The reason for the labels is clear; it's entirely functional and nothing to do with any sort of metaphysical prejudice. What materialism purports to explain is the ontological basis for experiences and just things in general; it does not try to deny the existence of experience.
Now Bernardo would probably rebut that he's not claiming that materialism denies the existence of experiences but then why bring up any of that within the context of invalidating materialism?? Hence I say that he's a victim of his own intellectual sleight-of-hand which may have something to do with his abbreviated training in philosophy.
Hmm, second thing that struck me is Bernardo very breezily ascribing physicalism (philosophical materialism) to late-nineteenth century class struggle...!
I think he's grasping at straws with that one, constructing an interesting solution for a problem that doesn't actually exist; Bernardo wants people to believe that philosophical idealism was the societal norm until relatively recently but that's quite a stretch given how natural it is to take everything at face value -- indeed, that's the logic behind the universal appeal of peekaboo for babies: They are greatly amused by the now-you-see-me/now-you-don't precisely because they are such natural literalists. Indeed, that's the whole point of humor, the intellectually ticklish contrasts between context and subtext!
So if anything it's not that we've only rather lately become physicalists or materialists but that we struggle still to outgrow our innate grounding in such perceptions. But yes it's certainly quite amusing for B. to declare materialism bougie LOL
Hmmm...the first thing that struck me is how simplistic a notion Bernardo has of economics -- despite him having been a senior executive at ASML! -- that succeeding at AI would free up people to take up philosophy but for "corporate greed!"
The premise behind that sentiment is so naïve (he obviously doesn't recognize the real role of money in a complex society, never mind what money actually is) that it reminded me of how folks can be so brilliant in some areas while so totally ignorant in others...!
No, unless we get replicator technology like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, there is just no getting away from money and the "need" to "earn" it...the matter of work is ancient and deep and unfortunately not only a matter of freeing up more and more people from the most menial forms of it....