in accordance with the customs of this university I opened the ceremony with a prayer spear to something larger in our chances at colonoscopy please have seat before I'll give the floor to the candidate I shall briefly introduce to you the members of the board next to me is the two supervisors professor Slauson dr. de bruyne you will not hear them for the next hour because they are only party of the defendant and then we have the committee of opposition professor baka from our University professor Carr from Queen University in London professor Coleman from the University of Hertfordshire dr. Giese bez from the University of Leiden dr. Kayson and professor barring from our University I now give the floor to the candidate with the provision of the Council of Dean's and in order to obtain the degree of doctor from Radboud University Nijmegen I would like to defend in public my doctoral thesis and then they take idealism the consciousness-only ontology I'll try to give you a very brief overall summary of what is more or less complex argument the problem that we are facing is not a problem of science is not about the behavior of nature but it's about what nature is in itself the essence of nature and the mainstream view regarding that today is that within our brains within our skull the qualities of experience of concrete experience are generated color flavor sound and what is actually in the world of there are abstract entities that are defined through quantities spin momentum mass charge space time position and according still to this mainstream view these entities outside they are not just modeling devices to allow us to model and predict the contents of perception they supposedly exist outside consciousness the problem with that is that once you create this gap that there is a world that is not consciousness you face a gap that you can't reach it's called the hard problem of consciousness today and to state it very simply there is nothing about mass charge space-time position there's nothing about quantities in terms of which one could deduce concrete qualities this is the hard problem and it seems to suggest to us that something is going wrong in our thinking because we are trying to reduce consciousness to abstractions of consciousness and that doesn't go right so the alternative that I proposed is the following the principle is to change what philosophers called the reduction base basically when you explain something in nature you reduce it to something else you explain the body in terms of organ systems organ systems in terms of tissues those in terms of cells atoms subatomic particles and there you have to end somewhere you have to end you cannot keep on explaining one thing in terms of another forever where you end is called a primitive and you can choose your primitive whatever you want so long as you can explain everything else in terms of it so in this thesis I choose as primitive consciousness and to avoid a number of problems we say well this consciousness is universal otherwise we face a number of problems regarding the combination of consciousness cells and so on and the the claim is that our experiences are patterns of excitation of these universal consciousness just like ripples are partner patterns of excitation of water there's nothing to ripples not water there's nothing to experience but consciousness and the regularities of nature the laws of physics corresponds to the modes of excitation of miss consciousness that's the claim the problems that you can face is well I don't read your thoughts and presumably you can't read mine so how come we have separate minds how can we seem to inhabit the same world outside ourselves and how come we can't change this world by a mere act of volition these are the problems that I try to address in the thesis the main device used to try to explain this is the following in a normally integrated mind you have cognitive associations between the contents of consciousness in other words I thought evokes an emotion which may evoke a memory which evokes another emotion which evokes another thought and so on and this consciousness of consciousness or patterns of vibration are integrated such that they are all accessible but there is a phenomenon psychiatry called dissociation very well known empirically in which some of this cognitive associations break they cease to exist and then you create separate centers of consciousness that are full functions in all terminology that you probably recognize this used to be called a multiple personality disorder which shows empirically that there is something in nature that allows consciousness - apparently fragment itself into multiple centers of awareness so the claim in the thesis is default we start with one primitive one reduction base and that's universal consciousness the reason we have tried that in our lives is that through dissociation and outer Associated outer is created within this universal consciousness and it has its private thoughts and emotions and so on and it's surrounded by the thoughts and emotions and so on at a transpersonal level of the rest of nature which I'll call mind at large in the part of the universal consciousness it's not a dissociated outer and these mental activities surrounding us in binges on the dissociative boundary of our outers and that what we call the process of perception and we give names with photons hitting our retina sent molecules hitting the nucleus lining of our nose and so forth that's what distant perception so what you see out there is not a world of thoughts and emotions it's the physical world because perception needs to encode the states of the world outside it in order to resist the second law of thermodynamics there is a complex argument behind this but the idea is that if you would mirror the experiential States outside as they are inside you would dissolve internet tropic soup you wouldn't you would not be able to maintain structural functional integrity now regarding other people or other living beings suppose you have two outers the dissociated mental activity in a second outer were also impinge on mind at large through the dissociative boundary our actions in the world the footprint which we live in the world by being in it to change the state of mind at large which will in turn in binge on another author and what this other author will see is a biological body that's the encoded version of that process of impingement of experiential States that's the claim so what you have at the end and this is my last slide is a number of altars immersed in a field of transpersonal experiences of phenomenality which explains why we seem to all live in the same world we are all immersed in that field and we can't change the world at will because our revelation is also disassociated so it cannot affect directly the states of the world having presented this summary of my doctoral thesis I returned the floor to director thank you I know we have to flow to Professor Bogart their candidate first of all let me congratulate you on completing your PhD thesis in which you defend a rather unusual or perhaps even bold position now being a historian of philosophy myself I was wondering about the historical backgrounds of the position you defend in your book now there if I've read correctly there are two passages where you say something about this one is in the introduction of page nine and the other one is on page 30 and I will read that the last passage there you write whereas in idealism in the West whereas I deal in his idealism in the West has had his heyday in the 18th and 19th century there you mentioned Bishop Berkeley and Hegel it is now enjoying renewed interest for having been updated and revitalized with compelling new formulations now as for these compelling new formulations you refer to your own work thereby suggesting that your position is something like a new formulation or an update of some of the more traditional forms of idealism and likewise throughout your study one encounters claims that make you think of someone or another form of historical traditional idealism now I have two questions in this respect the first one is a methodological question why have you decided not to be a little bit more explicit about these historical backgrounds don't you think that this would have helped your reader to better appreciate and evaluate your position that's the methodological question then content wise what is the link between your position and some form of historical idealism is it merely a reformulation is it merely an update or is it something more than that all right sir and I'll start with the first question on a methodological level they have been since vanozza perhaps ten generative generations fighting for what Spinoza meant perhaps nor as still fighting about what Schopenhauer meant hey do you understand what he meant I think except that somehow the universal mind is rational I didn't want to get into into that debate because I would be forced to take a position that others would then feel compelled to point out that it's wrong since this has been debated for so long having said that I of course expected your question so I came prepared with a few more slides I don't know if the tech guy can turn on the Beamer again a while he's doing that I'll briefly touch on Berkeley and a Joe Barton's idealism would entail that the contents of perception as mental state are themselves irreducible and they are maintained as they are by God as an observer if there are no human or animal observers to hold that state I do fur from that in the sense that I don't think our perceptual States are irreducible I think they are reducible but two other mental states the mental states of mind at large so I don't think that our personal experiential States are themselves irreducible I would not talk much about hey go because I don't think I am unique in say oh it's saying that I never figured out Hegel very well what he actually meant I will talk about briefly about Spinoza account and Schopenhauer the laugh that the latter is the one thing comes the closest to me although that's a very contentious claim because are you argue that the will is consciousness and many will say you're out of your mind that's not what he meant I'm prepared to defend this claim if we come to that I don't have the video yet so just wink through this according to Spinoza let's start from Spinoza the categorical basis of everything that would be God the divinity which is not very helpful it's more of a taxonomy because we don't really know all the attributes of God so we're not really explaining something we're just finding a place for that and and that that that the essence would express itself through different aspects for two aspects which Spinoza calls attributes very strange words a substance is a very strange word for what he meant as well and and that everything in the work world or the modes of Spinoza would have done this two aspects this is dual aspect monism it's not idealism because the substance the essence is neither mental Norma Tyrael only its aspects were mentally material so that's the difference with with respect to to Spinoza then you go to can't it can't be transcendental idealism transcendental in the sense that it transcends our perception it's Liza man there still so I'll just wing it through what's on my screen don't thought we can make no statement about what things are in themselves the Newman ax he thought that was beyond rich all we can know are the phenomenon the contents of our perception which are themselves and mental and he commits a brief incoherence he says that the Newman are caused the phenomenon that's incoherent because according to current time and space themselves modes of cognition they don't exist out there ta'ala t only works within time and space so he can't really say that the numinous calls phenomena this this is an inconsistency that was already pointed out in cancer long time but the key questions are what are the nomina it's a question he doesn't answer what's the relation between newman and phenomena because it can't eat causal and and what is the subject of experience that represent things that's phenomenal I also left unanswered and finally Schopenhauer my favorite Schopenhauer went ahead and beyond accounts by saying the following I don't access the thing in itself as far as the objects of the world around me but I can't access the thing in itself as far as I am concerned I have a privileged inside view of myself although I don't have that view about everything else in the world because I am myself by being myself I can say something about what I am in itself even if nobody is looking at me and what he found was the will which is just consciousness but he had to highlight that the states of that consciousness were one endogenous it couldn't be perceptual it couldn't have intentional content since the way the way it starts and active because the universe is dynamic so you have to wheel something to have an impetus for change I think that's the only reason he chose the word will start off the first sound or consciousness the questions he leaves unanswered and I try to tackle is why is there an individual subject of representation how does that subject arise within the wheel and why are representations the phenomenon of perception so different from the wheel itself qualitatively what it is like to be me is very different from what it's like for you to look at me why is there a certain was different and I tried to tackle that question well the fact that you saw my question coming in that you have prepared this elaborate answer proves Universal idealism right I think so thank you very much the floor is to a professor Carr I have two rather specific questions and under that I'll start with the first which concerns the relationship between consciousness and the brain now the idealistic model which which you propose claims that consciousness is is fundamental in the sense of its primary and in some sense universal now that would seem to imply that consciousness is not actually produced by brain which of course is the the mainstream view of physicalists but that actually it's if the brain is merely a filter of consciousness and of course that is a view which other philosophers like Huxley have also advocated but I was a bit puzzled because in your thesis you don't actually explicitly refer to the filter theory of the brain so I would just like to ask you explicitly to you know whether you do regard yourself as a filter theorists and and because although it's obviously not the mainstream view it's not the physical istic view I mean you obviously don't fear disagreeing with the physical istic view on etre Barnard I think the future theory is an excellent metaphor in the sense that things happen as if the brain were a filter of consciousness there is a chapter in my thesis where I talk about empirical evidence and that empirical evidence seems to suggest exactly that when the brain when normal brain activity is impaired consciousness that consciousness contents actually increase and expand in under certain circumstances and that would suggest that when you impair the filter less is filtered out I don't mention it explicitly because I didn't want to run into the trap of being reported as a substance duelist because the filter I hypothesis seems to suggest that there is the brains material and it's a filter and then there is consciousness of another essential nature that gets filtered by the brain I mean it's likely you have a coffee filter and coffee and they are not the same thing for the filter to filter coffee it has to be something else made of something else so I didn't wants to avoid the the implicit suggestion that I was defining dualism when I'm in fact defending idealism why do things work as though the filter hypothesis were true if the brain is the image the extrinsic appearance of a dissociative process in universal consciousness damage damage to the brain damage to that dissociative process under certain circumstances certainly not all will impair the dissociative process itself and what is an impaired dissociative process it's less dissociation therefore more experiential content and expansion of consciousness under certain circumstances so I see the brain if I am to speak literally I don't see the brain literally as a filter but as the image there are parents of a process of dissociation or localization of experiential contents and in being so everything works as though it were a filter but without dualistic implications and as regards whether it generates independently whether one journalist or not would you argue that the brain does not generate consciousness certainly not I think consciousness is my primitive so nothing generates it it's the bottom of the line of reduction I think the brain is the image there are parents of a certain dissociative process in consciousness it's the way it looks like from across the dissociative boundary and that's why there is this excellent correlation between measurable brain activity and reported inner experience the former is the image of the latter it's what the letter looks like from across the dissociative boundary so of course there will be these correlations my second question sort of follows on from that it seems to me that the key feature of your model is how does the unitary consciousness fragment into this multitude of individual consciousnesses which would you call alters and and you also relate this relate this to the phenomena you call deal IDs which i think is dissociated identity disorder in psychotherapy which i found interesting nevertheless it seemed to me you didn't really solve this problem completely and you didn't really solve the question of how you get individualized consciousness within this global consciousness and it seems to me that a crucial element of the answer that has to do with time and the passage of time now in in your dissertation you you sort of sort of rather quickly dismissed the passage of time as a as an illusion well maybe it's an illusion and the sense of spaces and illusion and all the physics is an illusion but it seemed to me if it is an illusion it's a very interesting illusion and and I would just like to ask you to elaborate a bit on the connection between the problem of selfhood and the problem of the passage of time that's an excellent question you are correct that in my thesis I don't provide a complete analytical explanation of the process of dissociation leading to cope conscious centers of awareness how can one consciousness break itself up into multiple centers of awareness that are concurrently conscious an analytic explanation for that would obviously entail time because concurrently that that word already appeals to time my argument is mostly based on on an empirical claim if I were to reword it I would say we may not know analytically exactly how that called conscious those conscious centers of awareness happen but we know that they happen in the last ten years maybe 15 there have been a lot of evidence in that respect altars that fight for control of the body for instance play mischief on each other so the claim is we may not know we may not really understand that very well to the final detail but we know empirically that Nature has that process so whatever it is I appeal to it because I know it exists an ultimate analytical answer to this is difficult because we think in terms of time and space verbs appeal to time tenses past present and future it's very difficult to make an analytical argument from outside time but I am completely with you in the sense that Co consciousness the ultimate explanation for that probably will require a better understanding the better theory of time theories of time are all over the place in physics today there are some like Julian Barbour that claim that time doesn't exist at all physics works out without T as a whole book explained that Lee Smolin would say that time is the only thing that exists and space is the illusion and the loop quantum gravity guys would say the time does exist but it's not primary it emerges out of those microscopic quantum processes so it's a wide field that I didn't want to touch I understand that the point I'm making is that to me that makes an interesting link with physics because when you talk about what goes beyond time or how do you understand the passage of time that can conceivably have a physical explanation because theories of physics do go beyond ordinary space and time so that's why it interested me I concur maybe future what and the flawless to professor Coleman think so very interesting thesis enjoy reading it to you small questions so the first one is does the dissociation model really explain how you get multiple Minds existing within another mind so in dissociation isn't that really one mind becoming two minds or several minds it's not a model of an overarching mind in which other minds exist at the same time but that is what you're supposed to be modeling so looks on the face of it like that doesn't no help to you that doesn't explain a universal consciousness with mini consciousness is existing inside it the second question is I wonder if you've really helped us with them with the hard problem at all so isn't it strange that brains on your view have got these two radically different appearances one is neural activity on brain scans and the other is a rich inner life doesn't seem like chairs have got that same dual appearance and inner life in an outer life on your view so on all the problems of all the difficulties of the hard problem of consciousness still there in your view you've got to explain why brains I've got these two radically different appearances and how one of those entails the other and that really is the hard problem of consciousness just in other terms that sir Sam I'll start with the first question you know that means you aren't going to go about it I think dissociative identity disorder for the analogy to hold rigorously we cannot think in terms of intentional content in terms of perception because a person with the ID has an outside world that that person perceives the different alters perceive that outside world universal consciousness if it undergoes something in some way analogous to the ID has to no external world all states are endogenous because it's all there is so for the analogy to be rigorous we have to compare a person with the ID having for effort for example a dream in which all states are endogenous and universal consciousness because now you're comparing apples to apples in both cases all states of that mind are endogenous and research shows that patients with D ID when they are dreaming the different alters experienced the same dream from different point of view I think I decide to the paper in a thesis so you could have a five-year-old alter that is playing on a corner and you have an eighteen-year-old out there that's doing something else in in the same dreamed space so to say there is evidence for this is it conclusive or not it's very difficult to say without accompanying neural imaging because principal the patient can confabulate but if confabulation is happening then it's surprisingly consistent confabulation so my appeal would be to that empirical basis even if I can not as we just as I just discussed with Professor Carr even if I cannot analytically go down to all the details in a way that my intellect will be satisfied we know that nature offers a process where this happens and I leverage that your second question do I really solve the hard problem well I know this is not what you meant but for the record strictly speaking it circumvents the hard problem because I'm not trying to reduce consciousness and the hard problem is how do you reduce consciousness if I take it as my my reduction base I don't need to reduce it you want to comment yeah so I think the dis analogy that you invoked between one person for whom there is an outside world in the universe for which there isn't isn't the dis analogy I was picking up on interesting as it is the dis is knowledge I'm picking up on is this if my mind becomes comes to harboured associate dissociated alters one mind becomes two or more but that means that the one mind doesn't exist anymore that's not a model of universal consciousness on the more universal consciousness you've got an overarching mind which in some sense contains or supports Minds within it my question is does the model how would the model of dissociation explain that that does it doesn't seem to capture what the model would explain would be a universal mind that fragments into many minds but then there's no there's no longer any interpersonal transpersonal field that you describe yeah maybe I came back to that I'm gonna comment on the other bit in psychiatry people do refer to what they call the host personality which is the umbrella around the different alters it's usually the everyday persona when the person is in a normal state would that be this encompassing mind through which the authors communicate well again evidence from dream states seems to corroborate that the host personality narrates the dream from a perspective of overview in which the other authors are sort of formed in the trauma but when all their personalities are in control they narrate the dream from from their individual points of view so I think the analogy does hold fairly well between a dissociated human mind which is all-encompassing and the sub personalities that experience the dream from their particular points of view I mean I know it in your thesis you don't talk about a host mind or any or an encompassing mind you talk about the person which could be understood to me in the body so that could be understood to mean a body which contains several distinct minds I don't think the idea of the host personality I think there's a tension here either the host personality contains the other personalities as figments or parts of a dream in which case they don't have full reality or or they like Pete they like people in my dreams who are not really people you know much as I may think they are or those other personalities are real as it standalone independent in which case they're not encompassed by the host so I think there's a tension there but can I comment on the the hard problem responses you gave just before it slips my mind so you said the hard problem is the problem of which how to reduce consciousness well here's another way of framing it what's the relation between brain activity and first personal conscious life that problem is still with us on your view I dare to differ the relationship between brain activity and my inner life is that brain activity is what my conscious in your life looks like from across my dissociative boundary why doesn't it look just the same sorry do stop me when I'm going on to up and that's my here that's my brought some question why does why doesn't it look just the same why did these two radically different appearances that is the problem of conscious yeah I have I have an answer for that two arguments one is the evolutionary argument argument that people in California has been putting forward his name escapes me now which is the idea that we didn't evolve as a species to perceive the environment outside ourselves as it really is there has been proof there has been a proof already that if if that happened we would be driven to extinction very very quickly we evolved to perceive the world in a way that that facilitates survival not in the way that maximizes the authenticity of what you see so what you're trying is to maximize and highlight the the circumstances that you need to cognize that needs to be salient in the world for you to survive that's why the states of perception intentional states are qualitatively so different from endogenous feeling emotion thought states because we didn't evolve to mirror them we evolved to code them in a way that would facilitate survival another argument is the entropy argument there has been a very complex mathematical proof that once in my life I understood probably don't understand it anymore which is that if you have an organism define whose boundaries are defined by a Markov blanket which states can communicate from the inside to the outside the inner states of that organism that mirror the states of the world you need to have that because you need to know something about the world in order to survive if that mirroring is has high fidelity in the sense that you simply mirror those states where they are inside the organ in the organism across a Markov blanket he would not be able to maintain your structural and functional integrity you dissolve into an entropic soup to avoid that and resist the second law of thermodynamics what alternate organisms would have to do is to mirror the outside state in an encoded form that provides you a view of the environment at a glance it shouldn't be emotion couldn't be thought it should be what well the screen of perception this implies that the chairs a different type received them which seems to cut against your TV broadcasting analogy late in thesis but perhaps that something we can talk about later let me comment quickly on that I know no we move on to the next opponent the Flores to dr. Harris esteemed candidate I read your thesis with much enjoyment certainly in part because I disagreed with it so often which is always stimulating and so I would like to start out by a question on on what I think is a very important epidemiological thesis that you pause it at the beginning really of your of your argument and which I like to think of it your Cartesian thesis it's the claim that matter outside mind is not an empirical observation but rather an explanatory model and so this is of course the Cartesian claim of the failure of ideas right we do not perceive the material objects around us what we are aware of is only our consciousness our ideas and we have to sort of posit or call it as an explanatory thing the the objects out there now it doesn't surprise me in a sense very much that from this thesis you can derive idealism because the whole lesson of 17th and 18th century European philosophy seems to be that if you accept this Cartesian thesis and you don't have a benevolent God to come and rescue you there's no way out right you never get from behind a veil of ideas and you're never going to get to the world of external objects but for many philosophers and I would I would say that the first really great one among them is can't and this is a reason to fight the Keynesian theses all right to claim that we do in fact perceive material objects to reject the claim that we are behind the veil of ideas and that's a pretty common sense right if I think about what I perceive I would say well tables people chairs you've got to have some philosophical arguments to to convince me that I'm wrong and those philosophical arguments can be resisted and I would say probably should be resisted so I'm wondering because you don't say too much about it I'm why you think that we should actually follow Descartes in this move on it sir I'm not sure I would characterize my position as following their cart I think there are more subtleties to that let me put it this way I don't dispute that this little table exists as I perceive it it exists as a concrete object that I feel it's hard it has color even has a smell but I say that it exists only insofar as it is represented in the screen of my perception now unlike Berkeley I will not end there because then you need God to be observing this table so the table can continue to exist if I and nobody else is looking at it I do grant that there are Newman are but the lumina are themselves experiential there is a state outside all observers that state is held if the observers are not translating that state into a physical world in ask on the screen of perception but those states are themselves experiential and why is that important because by not postulating any ontological category beyond experience I don't fall into the unbridgeable gap of the hard problem of consciousness so you could think of idealism yes okay we are all dreaming and we happen to have the same dream because some part of mind is broadcasting that dream to us all I don't think that works it would still entail that perception is irreducible but I don't think that works because you see if we are each a television screen receiving a broadcast after some perspective adjustments and so on that comes from a deeper unified part of mind then why do I see you why does one television screen appear in the program that has been broadcast to another television screen I think that's the reason why Barclays idealism would not work I think we do need nomina there has to be some state out there in the world I call them the states of mind at large but I don't think they are material in the sense that we'd normally characterize I don't think they have defined specific physical properties like a charge momentum spin space time position when nobody's looking at them and I would argue quantum physics has shown already that this indeed cannot be the case that there is something out there which is modeled by a wave function but that something is not Material in the way we normally use the word in conversation it doesn't have definite physical properties it's an arena of possibilities of superposed thoughts if you will and therefore it's my observation that brings the physical world into existence and it is these it's really concrete it's really what it seems to be and nothing else there are states out there but they are not physical I completely agree that your idealism is not identical to barkleyz idealism and I did not want to suggest that it was but I'm worried about why somebody who does not want to be an idealist among which I by the way to not necessarily count myself although well whatever never mind why somebody who would not want to be an idealist will follow you in this first step right where you say well there is an epistemological asymmetry between our knowledge of mind and our knowledge of matter because and I think you you make this very clear because we do not perceive material objects and now you tell me yes but actually we do perceive material objects right we perceive this exactly the way you think about it and so on if that's true I don't see where the epistemic logical asymmetry comes in I understand I understand your point okay matter is a theoretical hypothesis of matter meaning something outside and independent of consciousness so different ontological category it's a theoretical postulate that helps us make sense or at least three facts one we all seem to share the same world outside ourselves too I can't read your thoughts and I can't change the world by an act of inner volition I can't imagine the world to be different limit changes that doesn't happen and three there is a very good correlation between patterns of brain activity and reported in an experience so to answer these three questions the physicalist would say well then there is a physical world out there with definite properties and arrangements they're off in the form of brains generates the qualities of experience what I think that's that it's a valid proposal as far as theoretical proposals go but I do see an epistemic asymmetry in there because now you're inferring a different ontological category than the one you know to exist which is experiential States now I wanna say that there are nominal but they are experiential yes I'm also making an inference otherwise I would be a solipsist and I'm not so I have to infer something beyond the bounds of personal experience I have to infer that the earth continues beyond the horizon in order to answer make sense of these three questions really well in the same world and so on and so forth but I don't think that inference needs to be taken so far as to postulate another ontological category other than experience because then instead of saying that well the earth continues beyond the horizon I'm saying there is another earth there is a shadow earth and it's completely different ontologically from the states I know to exist that step I think is not justified I think it's much more parsimonious to say oh I stick to the ontological category I know to exist but I have to exist to make an inference in order to make sense of the regularities that we perceive okay if I have time or ask another question if maybe a second round okay so the first two dr. Kayson dear candidates thank you and dr. Giese best for giving me a great lead up to my own question which is about the givenness of the mind so in Chapter two page 31 you claim that we do not know matter in the same way that we know mine for matter as an inference and mind the given as you were just saying this claim is intended to support the thought that mainstream physics is physicalism is so pathetically inferior to idealism as you've just argued given that it's also important namely matter is an inferential abstraction rather than a given such mine's however later on in the dissertation chapter 5 where you want to argue that there are no unconscious mental processes you repeatedly stress that introspective access to the minds requires more than merely having an experience it requires consciously knowing that you have the experience right and this reason Tatian of knowing that you have an experience can even misrepresent the original experience on page 77 you say this and this leads me to the following two questions first if it's through that to know our own mind we need a possibly mistaken re representation of our own experience doesn't that mean that mine as we know it is not given and just as much a project of entrance abstraction as matter s and does that mean that even by your own standards idealism loses its superior of semuc signs of materialism and a second question if we know our own minds only via possible mistaken representation of experience then doesn't this give eliminative is about consciousness like say daniel dennett exactly what they want to do they give them more purchase because if our own conscious experiences are never immediately given to us but only a construct to me Jung use Occam's razor and cut them out completely honored sir regarding our first question I'm gonna know about it to know that an ontological category exists you do not need to know every instance of that category I do not need to have explicit introspective access to all the contents of my experience in order to know for sure that experience exists I need only to know some instances after even one instance of that ontological category it's not the case of it's not the case of a Black Swan one instance proves the point so it's say so that we cannot explicitly self-reflective way introspect into all of our experiential states i don't think that changes the or weakens the the epidemic claim that i make i i we could explore Humes argument against the mind and riches as well maybe now I'm already going to second question we don't really know the mind all we know are states experiencial state and we abstract something it's called the mind to be behind that and it's as unknowable as the material world now back in the 18th century I think when Hume said that people thought okay Berkeley just eliminated matter now human he eliminated minds what are we left with I think that argument was somewhat some some form valid in Hume stein because he was actually arguing against the soul not the mind as an ontological category and we as we would understand it today it was I'm against psyche and then indeed you cannot infer personal soul behind the body just because you have access to experiential States that inference is not just fine but you of course can infer based on a very few experiential states that the experience exists as an ontological categories it's nature's so given it's the only thing a five-year-old kid will know before we start educating the kids living on material world outside the field of experience actually most adults today I don't think they really grasp what physicalism is saying that this table as I perceive it is entirely inside my skull and that there is an arrangement completely abstract arrangement arrangement of atoms somewhere beyond this ceiling because this ceiling is also inside my skull as I experience it somewhere beyond the stars there is an abstract arrange of arrangement of atoms that then stimulate me into proceeding this table it's a fantastic claim extermo logically speaking so I would stick by my academic claim despite Hume and despite the point you made I think an instance of experience shows without doubt that experience exist as an ontological category and I would go further there's an argument that has been made by Galen Strawson back in 2036 I think he said not even a sensible Buddhist will deny that experience entails an experiencer a subject of experience experiences being some way related to the subject subject of experience I would say that the subject is its consciousness and experiences are patterns of vibration of consciousness so they are not two ontological categories but I think the existence of any one experiential States proves that experience exists in that therefore there is an experiencer there is a dative of experience there is a receiver an entity to use sounds words there is that to which the qualities of experience are given or disclosed from a perspective constituting a phenomenal field surrounding that subjective experience I think a single instance surprises to prove both should I understand you as now distinguishing between say on the one hand mediated experiences where you might be mistaken and unmediated experiences where you just immediately have introspective access to them or how should we should I understand this response of there being this one single instance every experience ultimately is unmediated it's directly available to the subject right mediation is something that you can you can use at an abstract level and I'll - let's go back to Schopenhauer Schopenhauer would say you know they will immediately with representation due to experienced representations immediately but what is behind the representation is not immediate it's mediated but what is mediated is then an experiential state to which you can reduce intentional experiential States so start with intentional experiential States which are immediate I experienced them directly experience you directly as a subject right now if I want to reduce this immediate experiential state to other experiential states namely your inner life how you feel from inside that is then not immediate there is a translation from a set of qualities to another set of qualities across its societal boundary thank thesaurus to a professor body your candidate my question also concerns the heart problem so it relates to questions that we asked before you take it to be a point of favor in favor of going of your conscience only ontology that it does not not have to tackle the hard problem of consciousness even that everything in nature is grounded in phenomenal consciousness there's no longer any question of explaining how consciousness can arise out of mere non conscious matter however it's not clear that this way of evading the problem can really satisfy our explanatory needs instead of an explanation for why I say seeing a red tomato is an experience like this we now have to we now have taken a phenomenal experience of redness as a given as a primitive of our universe it seems that the mainstream physicalist can make a similar move by taking as primitive the fact that the specific constellation of matter leads to this specific phenomenal experience of redness so plently said you don't have to cross a gap since you assume that you're ready on the right side but there's still not much explanation what's more in your specific version of idealism we seem to create a new hard problem the problem of how phenomenal contents of one alter can impinge on the dissociative boundary of another alter given the special nature of these impingements it seems that we cannot really explain it in terms of the material physics that we know or anything like it is there than really at the dialectical advantage so idealism of our mainstream physicalism with respect to the hard problems of consciousness I would like to hear what you think about this on our modern start in the first part of your question to reduce an experiential state to other experiential states does not entail any hard problem it's rather trivial I can reduce a thought previous thoughts I can reduce an emotion I feel - a thought I've had I can reduce an opinion to a memory all these are experiential states and that there are cognitive associations between these states and other ones at one state evokes another constituting then possible chain of reduction if you work your way back I think that is trivial and then there's no hard problem what I'm doing is precisely this I'm reducing the experience transfers and experiential states out there to the experiential the intentional experiential States I have when I look out to the world death translation between experiential State - experiential State I think is trivial and in that perspective from that perspective might would stick by my stomach claim that I do circumvent the the heart problem because I'm not trying to reduce consciousness to something non conscious and reducing patterns of excitation of consciousness to other patterns of excitation of consciousness which by the way is how physicists go about it Barnard in theory in string theory that's exactly what they are doing all the time it's a play of patterns of vibration or excitation could you remind me of the second part of your question so your version of idealism since you have to explain why we have the feeling that we are in the same world so that is maybe not how the heart problem issues should be put but it that still it seems to be a bridge that we have yeah to cross well I'll stick to my guns I acknowledge the nomina but my claim is the noumenon are experiential I'm avoiding the word phenomenal here because it would contradict the way count he used the word phenomenal today phenomena according to Ned block since 1995 is just experiential states including and art in the states they don't need to have a intentional content for current phenomena were always intentional in nature but never mind so I acknowledge the luminary the nomina our experiential and then I'm left with the problem of reducing experiential states to the nominal which are themselves experiential to what intuition could we appeal imagine that you have a be associated emotion that you've repressed and because it's dissociated you cannot evoke it anymore to bear it deep in your psyche you can't evoke it you don't know that you have that that emotion hit another Bank but it in pink is constantly on your conscious life it impinges on the thought you have to a color the types of thoughts you have the types of decisions you make this is abundantly no known in psychology that repressed experiential states have a direct impact on our conscious lives and because they are dissociative dissociated we don't know that they are doing that this fits the bill perfectly for what I'm claiming the experiential states of the world beyond me are associated so I cannot intersective Li access them but they are impinging on me they are coloring my life through the screen of perception it's just that in the case of intentional content there is this translation of experiential States outside transpersonal wants to what we experienced as perception and mentioned earlier today there are at least two lines of arguments to explain why this qualitative transition happens to resist the second law of thermodynamics and an evolutionary argument I think that is extend cailli not comparable to having to reduce consciousness to matter which is itself a theoretical abstraction of consciousness we just chase our own tails at Lightspeed if we keep trying to do that I think there were a few opponents keen to continue the discussion and who cannot get to swirl but okay professor : Thanks just a quick one it's going to quote you on page 80 looking at a living organisms brain the Neel activity we discern is part of what the organisms inner life looks like when registered from a second person perspective that is across a dissociative boundary the matter constituting those neurons is the extrinsic appearance of feeling emotion thought imagination I just want to ask how many brains have I got because there are a lot of different people that could perceive it in that way so the matter constituting those neurons yeah is the extrinsic appearance of feeling emotion thought and so on now my brain can appear to multiple observers at a time correct so if the matter constituting those neurons is the appearances and there were lots and lots of appearances too lots lots of observers my question is just how many brains have I got yeah so what happens there according to what I'm putting forward you are now turn your dissociated there's a dissociative boundary around you the extrinsic appearance of that is your skin if you dig deeper into your skull the appearance of your meta conscious thoughts you know the inner life that you can inter spectively access will be the neural correlates of consciousness what we call the NCC's so what's happening there that meta conscious in their life is in painting on mine at large on the state of the experiential state that surrounds your outer and we'll be leaving an impression on those states of mind at large now those states will then impinge on other outers and from that we arise my perception of your NC seeds as I observe perhaps through an fMRI yeah now my perspective within the experiential medium of consciousness will present those traces of the activity of your author in mind at large in a certain way somebody else occupying another position in the experiential milieu of universal consciousness we experience those disturbances from another perspective essentially they are the same disturbances experienced from different points of view one way to visualize that is to imagine that your imprint on mind at large by the mere fact that you are thinking because visualize status is way from propagating from from their source as they propagate they interact with the pre-existing states of mind at large which are not necessarily imprinted by you so different observers in different positions of that wavefront will experience their perception that perceptions in different ways if I put a wall between you and me I cannot see you anymore so that that part of your impact on the experiential milieu of universal consciousness it's not reaching me because it's interfering it's being blocked by other states that were already there according to what I'm putting forward you have to look at look upon everything as the image of a mental state so even a table between you and me a wall between you and me would be the extrinsic appearance of some experiential pattern that constitutes the universe and therefore there can be interference between the imprints that all of this creates the footprint it creates on on the space around it so there are differences of perspective even though the source of the disturbance is one in the same thanks you you rush showcase ok so I give for 2a I suppose yeah oh thank you I don't think I'll be able to ask my question but let me start just to keep the tension coming and I was wondering about the concept of altars ok the defense is hereby concluded I'll give the floor once again to the candidate having defended my doctoral thesis to the best of my ability I'd like to thank director and my supervisors as well as those who have honored this ceremony their presence the doctor'll examination board will retreat for deliberation [Music] on behalf of the Council of Dean's of Hobart University Nijmegen we have decided to award you the degree of doctor I invited professor Klaus to the charge the tasks assigned to him sorry in the name of the Lord with the power entrusted by the law to the Council of Dean's I hereby confer upon you Bernardo Costra the title of doctor from Rapid University Nijmegen to which were attached all of all the associated legal and customary rights and duties with respect to the academia and society as proof thereof I present you with his doctoral diploma signed by the rector and the doctoral thesis and supervises and Co supervisor please have a seat dear dr. Kostov dear Bernardo a little over one year ago lay on the brow told me that he was approached by a computer engineer who already had a PhD in computer science and who was interested in getting a another PhD but this I mean in philosophy of mind at work like university the vast university system is such that said Leon I should be the supervisor of the co promote the sorry the promoter of this engineer and Liam should be the co promote is that's not that's not fair but that's just the way things are in Holland so both Leon and I received actually several such requests each year and our standard response is one of reservation PhD supervision and philosophy is a time consuming exercise and chances of success are not terribly high especially in the case of external PhDs but this case is very interesting said Leon because it appears that most of the material for the thesis has actually already been written that doesn't make an interesting for us and if they'd changed things considerably so but there is one thing that Leon this guy isn't ideal is a metaphysical idealist right I have to admit that that made some alarm bells really because work by philosophers outside of academia about consciousness asked the metaphysical basis of reality and our universe it does have a tendency as a rule to be less than store early rigorous so this is the type of position that is not optional defended in academic philosophy and it's usually associated outside of academia with new age Western adaptations of Asian religions says there's absolutely nothing wrong with Asian religions but it does not automatically provide the style of argumentation that is required in the academic philosophy so we were a bit cautious but Leah I insist it is this is something this is someone with a PhD in computer science moreover many of his philosophical papers have already been published in fact one of his papers has just been accepted by the journal of consciousness studies which is quite something so we did make an appointment about a year ago actually a little I think approximately a year in a week something like discuss options yeah look it up in my column to discuss options and we had a very brief but very good conversation and this was definitely not a New Age freak but someone who seemed to know the literature and definitely seems to know the issues in the literature in contemporary allylic philosophy of consciousness so we were very interested we made a next appointment and we both read some of your papers and I remember remember a much longer meeting and a really interesting one and what I remember most actually is that is your response to a really serious point of criticism that I had and probably still have your response was instead of becoming defensive you said something like oK you've identified my weak spot this is something that I've been struggling with actually for some time and I don't think I can solve your problem completely but even though at some point I should I do not think that I need to solve the problem now in order to defend what is otherwise a valuable position that was the gist of your answer and I think that definitely tipped the balance for me because hermetically closed philosophical systems that are immune to criticism are uninteresting and this was to me this was real intellectual openness and that is essential I think especially if he defends a completely Baltar's proposal that basically implies that most academics are wrong about the nature of the universe you should have some openness that we don't agree on the nature of consciousness we don't agree on the nature of the universe but I do think that you're you're thinking poses an alternative for the received positioning of physicalism which I do agree is problematic as well that deserves attention and further discussion it over smart and very creative arguments and a well-thought-out worldview that has worked out in relative detail you're identifying address one of the main problems in the for the position of plant psychism and formulate a solution to it that is truly innovative in the preface to your thesis you thanked Leon and me for being your supervisors this is too much honor is really all we have done is offer some critique and advice on what on which papers to include and which not and how to write an intro and a conclusion most of the work was already done by you in a period that we didn't even know each other you did get some input from well-known philosophers but from what I gather that did not equal systemic feedback so basically you wrote a complete thesis on your own aside from six books and a couple of articles as well I have deep respect for the drive and the discipline that this must have required even more extraordinary is the fact that yours is the first external PhD thesis that consists of peer-reviewed published papers this is the type of PhD thesis that is encouraged by the Graduate School for the Humanities and by many supervisors us included but it turns out that it is a standard that is really hard to maintain if you're not working full time in academic philosophy so once more we have loss of respects for your your achievements DiBernardo you did have a PhD thesis already a title already but you now have you know a real Doctor of Philosophy congratulations [Applause] on behalf of the Council of Dean's I would like to congratulate you and your family with the doctorate and I would like to invite you to rise one more brief time for prayer caucus TBR Hamas omnipotens Deus homnibus benefit c2e screen TVs attractions Purim is a classic law [Music]