All perception is archetypal
Distinguishing between internal states in mind at large
Date: 4 November 2025
Duration: 2h 43m
With thanks to Rita conde
0:00:05 Bernardo’s cat revenge
0:01:47 A gift to Bernardo
0:03:20 This week’s topic: The Meaning and Modes of Perception
0:04:45 Are there mores Dashboards beyond our Dashboard?
0:06:10 Perceiving the World vs Being the World
0:11:16 Why are colours not part of us as well?
0:15:00 Perception as a Markov blanket
0:16:49 Even in sensory deprivation, there is a sense of being
0:18:58 Life without sensory perceptions
0:21:55 Is Mind-at-Large meta-cognitive?
0:24:28 Causal power in Mind-at-Large
0:26:04 Intentionality
0:29:14 Aren't all states endogenous?
0:32:10 There is no blue outside whatsoever
0:35:10 The Dashboard is at the boundary
0:38:27 Clarifying the terminology: endo / exo
0:39:40 Predictive Processing and Analytical Idealism
0:46:16 IIT and internal causal structures
0:47:33 Differences between Idealism and Physicalism
0:49:32 Checkerboard illusion & Predictive Processing
0:51:06 Truth is mostly irrelevant for evolution
0:53:25 Inference is a biological necessity
1:02:30 Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality | Anil Seth | TED
1:03:49 Body perceptions are also signals on the Dashboard
1:08:58 The paradox: there seems to be a world outside, although it’s all one mind
1:15:15 Geometry is different from seeing a triangle
1:17:17 The role of attention in the “New Unconscious” movement in psychology
1:20:00 Early stages of metaphysical enquiry: revision of fundamental distinctions
1:22:44 What engenders these compelling illusions?
1:24:50 Is perception driven by fitness, or purpose?
1:30:40 Archetypes
1:31:41 The Laws of Nature
1:34:00 Is there intrinsic semantic content in Dashboard perceptions beyond mere function towards survival?
1:35:11 Observing nature is a form of self-observation
1:35:50 Is the correspondence between the contents of perception and the cues out there arbitrary?
1:39:00 The evolution of languages in the direction of more abstraction and arbitrariness
1:42:15 The evolution of perception is less arbitrary than the evolution of language
1:44:00 Dante and “the love that moves the sun and the stars” (Paradiso, Canto XXXIII)
1:46:23 Are morality, beauty and meta-cognition examples of archetypes?
1:51:40 Bernardo’s Daimon as endogenous
1:58:07 Ego inflation
1:59:30 Recognising what in us is not us
2:02:00 Varieties of perception
2:05:00 What determines the circumference of our dissociation?
2:09:00 Teleological drive behind the process of individuation?
2:12:40 Frederico Faggin: the universal mind wants to know itself
2:13:00 A paradox of physicalism: building a copy of ourselves
2:20:36 Could synchronicity be meaningful?
2:30:50 Everything is synchronistic
2:34:20 Illusions betray a deeper truth
2:38:40 Life is the ultimate teacher, the ultimate guru — when you pay attention to it
2:41:40 Next week’s topics
If everything is consciousness, what does it mean to distinguish experiences that arise from within versus perceptions modulated from the outside?
This can be one of the more confusing aspects of this philosophy. If everything is 'mind' and the physical world is 'in us' just like everything else - what does it mean to say there is a dashboard onto an "outer world?"
The first 90 minutes of this session Bernardo explains this with great care and nuance. Whist it is true that all experiences are internal states, it is possible to distinguish between types of internal states.
Many of our thoughts and feelings are generated internally. They may be influenced by things we have seen and heard, but I can have a daydream that has nothing to do with the lecture hall in which I'm having it.
In contrast, other experiences are directly and immediately modulated by an external world, what Bernardo calls 'Mind at Large'. These are the experiential contents of mind from which we are seemingly dissociated. Things we hear, see, smell and touch in our shared reality are what Bernardo labels the dashboard of perception.
I highly recommend reviewing a short section from this presentation, in which Bernardo uses slides to explain the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic experience. This link should take you to 17 minutes into the talk where this is explained directly:
Predictive processing was also very relevant to the discussion - how perception is modulated by both very primitive and sophisticated priors; beliefs and expectations about what we are likely to see.
If you want more background, this free TED talk is a great intro, and for a more in-depth discussion, suitable for anyone wanting to understand how meditation can modulate perception, I recommend this course:
We also discussed:
- how all perception is archetypal
- the dashboard may hint at the purpose of reality
- predictive processing
- the meaning of synchronicity
- the evolution of language
and many other themes you can find in the timestamps below.
I look forward to seeing you next week!
Amir
Bernardo Kastrup
Analytic idealism
Bernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).
As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI company Euclyd BV.
Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the magazine of The Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. His most defining book is Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century’s only plausible metaphysics.
Explore Bernardo’s work →Go deeper
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