bob i think in laymens terms what lewis is basically saying is that if we have a good physical description of something, that unless a description that refers to the metaphysical increases our understanding of it that its superfluous and can be discarded for the purpose of increasing our understanding.
Well, if you read his book, perhaps you could see how he demonstrates that materialism is baloney. Of course, “baloney” is an expression for pretentious nonsense, but his concerns go further (as we have seen above), and there is a paragraph where this is made clear.
Actually it is, it is a requirement for them to work. In some cases it is simply accepted that it cannot ultimately be determined if it is true, but it must function as if it were.
Yes it does answer my question. From consciousness, Kastrup’s next step is to say that the brains function is to localize universal consciousness. And the focus of the locus (I liked saying that) is the body of an individual. So the brain is a filter. According to his theory, I suppose psychedelics like LSD and the sacred mushrooms neutralize the filtering effect of the brain. And the claim is that they can open up the gateway to universal consciousness. Of course the skeptic will say that Kastrup’s “step” is a leap of faith.
Not having read Kastrup’s book, I can only go by these excerpts.
To say that the function of the brain is to localize consciousness, to pin it to a space-time reference point, seems to be a different metaphysics from idealism, almost a return to Cartesian dualism. Just on the face of what he says, he seems to be suggesting that the brain exists independently of the mind, but that while the mind is universal, the individual brain somehow pulls down a piece of the universal consciousness to give it a particular individual perspective. An analogy would be a TV. Someone without knowledge of how a TV works would think that the device itself generates pictures and sound. Instead it is a conduit for pictures and sound that exist independently of the TV. But that is a form of dualism. So now, just from the excerpts, I can’t tell whether Kastrup is a straight idealist or some modern form of dualist.
So to look at anything one has to be conscious. And to be conscious of this is self-consciousness. The proposition here is that self-consciousness is filtered universal consciousness. That’s a possibility. Another possibility is that consciousness supervenes on a material substrate. How do we determine which possibility holds true?
I don’t think that we can determine which is true, which, I suppose, is why a lot of scientists hold philosophy in contempt and subscribe to the “just shut up and calculate” empiricism.
I’ll go instead with Charles Darwin, from the close of Origin of Species:
Grandeur is the perfect word for the fact of evolution, imo. And no, evolution does not rule out virtue, love, courage, unselfish behavior — it supports them. Nor does it rule out, though does not support, a spiritual realm.
Yeah that’s been my position for some time now–metaphysical skepticism. I think what’s happened though is that quantum physics has changed what is meant by materialism or physicalism so radically that it has stimulated the metaphysical imagination afresh.
I agree and Kastrup specifically invokes QM in support of his ideas. But here again we are in the unfortunate position that there are multiple interpretations of QM and at least two of them, superdeterminism and MWI, rule out the observer-dependent reality that Kastrup advances. And there is no way at the present time to decide between the competing interpretations.