"Not one serious defender of materialism left"
On the future & past of idealism, non-human civilisations, ethics, & the place for prayer
In this ‘Ask Me Anything’ session, Bernardo addressed several personal questions: about the call of his daimon to work on Artificial Intelligence, about how he (doesn't) organise his study, and about the past and future of idealism.
His predictions are grounded in the privileged access he has to academic discussions happening behind closed doors.
His observation? There is not one serious defender of materialism today.
"Not one of them is going to tell you, without reservation, that they truly think physicalism is ontologically true. The ones who will do that are not the thinkers involved in the process; they are the mouthpieces that have their public image committed to a certain point of view.
"So what you hear from them is rhetoric... It's about not losing face, it's about making sure your publisher is not angry with you because you said something that killed your book sales...
"So if we ignore the rhetoric and the ones that are doing this just for the image, the public circus... I don't see one seriously committed physicalist today that takes physicalism as ontologically true.
Some of them take physicalism as a convenient fiction that helps in the process of thinking about the world, and that's fair enough. Because that physicalism is not a metaphysics - that physicalism is instrumental."
So his prediction?
"I think in 10 to 20 years time, it will be a recognized mainstream view that physicalism doesn't work."
A lot of effort will be spent trying to prevent people from deriving nonsensical conclusions. "But it will become mainstream that physicalism doesn't quite work, and something along the lines of idealism is the most plausible."
For Bernardo, this is already the reality in many circles today, and it's a matter of time before this seeps into mainstream thinking.
Ancient non-human civilisations?
The second half of the meeting we took questions that couldn't find a home in recent themed meetings. A unique question was about idealism and potential prehistoric civilizations.
"I think it is a virtual certainty that there have been more than one civilization on this planet that we know nothing about. Including non-human ones.
"This rock has sustained life for 4 billion years. We know civilizations can start from nothing, like, agriculture, and rise to the level of interplanetary technology in about 6,000 to 8,000 years. Which, in the context of 4 billion years, it's not even the blink of an eye. You can hardly register it...
"We also now understand that the surface of the Earth is being constantly churned and renewed, not only because of erosion processes, but because of plate tectonics, especially the bottom of the sea. Every 100, 150 million years, what was the bottom of the sea 150 million years ago, it's now in the mantle, it's melted down.
"It's going to be reforged, and it's popping up again as the new bottom of the sea. There are very few places on this planet where you can find rocks that are 1, 2 billion years old. One of them is Greenland, by the way. And these places are, like, froth on top of a boiling planet that happened to float around enough and not being incorporated back into the mantle, reforged and recycled. If there were dozens of civilizations before us, human or otherwise, the statistical chance we would have signs for the presence of any of them are very, very low."
On the merits and power of prayer
We also took questions about how our states of mind, prayer and rituals might affect the wider world, the relationships between Hegel, Nietzsche, communism, and fascism, and the ethical implications of idealism.
If ritual is of interest, these two recent meetings are worth watching:
Amir Giles
Amir Giles
Changed timetable next three weeks...
Because of Bernardo's schedule and changing time zones, the meeting days and times will shift these coming three weeks - we should have dates and times finalised within a couple of days.
Thanks for your flexibility and always amazing questions!
Amir