Most of what you think you know about the essence of the self, the essence of reality, is probably wrong. I'm Bernardo Kastrup, director of Essentia Foundation. I'm a philosopher, computer scientist. and an author, and I have been promoting the idea that the essence of reality is not material, but actually mental.
The philosophy I put forward is called analytic idealism, and that is the notion that although there is an objective world outside our individual minds, a world that we inhabit, a world that doesn't really care what we think of it, whether we like it or not, whether we wish it to be different or not. There is an objective world, but it too is mental. Just like the thoughts of another person, which are objective from your point of view, you cannot control the thoughts of another person.
The thoughts of another person would still exist even if you were not around. Those thoughts are essentially mental as well. In the exact same way, I put forward the notion that The world out there, what we call the physical or material universe, from its own perspective, is subjective, it is mental, it is mind stuff that we see around us, represented on the screen of our perception as what we call matter.
So if this sounds very counterintuitive to you right now, As we go over the material in this course, hopefully it will look a lot more appealing, a lot more understandable, even almost self-evident, I dare to say. So, in this course we are going to cover our mainstream worldview of today, which is colloquially called materialism, technically it's called physicalism, that's what philosophers prefer to call it. We are going to review it, we are going to look into why it is wrong, all the different reasons why. We are already in the position to know that it is wrong, it is untenable. Then we are going to look at the alternative, which is analytic idealism.
We are going to look at how all of this plays with science. Because science and technology, we know, they do work. And that's very important. Whatever worldview we put forward that contradicts science is most likely wrong.
So we are going to look into how analytic idealism plays together with science, how one contributes to the understanding of the other and reinforces the other. All of this only has value if there are implications that have a bearing on our lives, if something changes in our lives, either in our behavior in the world or in our inner behavior, our inner thoughts, our emotions, how we regard life, how we regard... The meaning of this weird phenomenon that is biology, all of this is going to be reviewed as we go forward.
Now, although philosophy and metaphysics may sound abstract and remote, they inform every aspect of our lives. They inform how we relate to ourselves, to our emotions, our thoughts. Are they side effects of organic activity and therefore bound to disappear when we die? and therefore all of our sufferings for nothing? Or do they carry actual reality, reality in itself?
Because if so, then our psychological inner lives have a lot more meaning and weight than they would otherwise, and that has a bearing on our lives. So philosophy is actually the least abstract of the areas of knowledge we have. It is the area of knowledge that bears directly on every single aspect of life, how it relates to others, how it relates to the world at large and how we perceive meaning in everything we do.
It has a bearing on health care, what is the nature of the body and the mind, how do we go about curing illnesses. Philosophy informs that. Philosophy informs what areas of potential scientific research are plausible and therefore worthy of investment, and what other areas we may discard a priori because we think they will go nowhere.
Anyway, so in fact, everything changes if the narrative, the philosophical narrative, in terms of which we relate to ourselves and the world, changes. And nobody is immune from that. This is important for every living human being on this planet. Although some of this material will be heavy and scientific in nature, the material we are about to cover, we will try to make it light and very relatable.
And I ultimately hope that you also have fun watching this, watching the way we go about trying to answer the biggest questions of life. This is what we are trying to do. This course is a cooperation between Keto and Essentia Foundation.
And we are doing our best to make this not only useful, but fun to watch.