No need to transcend the human experience

You might think that your dashboard onto reality is something to be transcended, but Bernardo disagrees. This is an unfortunate inheritance from Christianity. The dashboard, your human perception, is also part of reality, governed by the same archetypal templates as Mind at Large. The perceptual apparatus and that which it interprets are equally real and there is no need to rank them. 

We are dissociated from Mind at Large, but there are also internal dissociations. So when boundaries dissolve, (either naturally or through psychedelic experience,) we might be in contact with universal experience, or alien bands of reality, or it might merely be our own trauma, and some mix of all the above.

So whilst it is possible to see beyond the dashboard whilst alive, it is very difficult to discern genuine transcendence from delusion.

Anyway, we likely get genuine access to the beyond after death - so Bernardo says; why rush?

There is validity in your perception that the sun moves across your sky.

Enjoy your human dashboard whilst it lasts!

Perception has layers. 

The interpretational layers of human perception evolve, over thousands of years and even slower, but the raw sensory data that this interprets is likely quite stable over the history of any given species. 

For example, some cultures will have names for shades of green that other people cannot distinguish, but the basic brain structure that receives raw data will be the same. 

An example of higher levels of perception modulating lower include the checker board illusion:

The A and B squares in this image are both exactly the same shade, but as our perception has evolved to accommodate shadows cast by objects blocking light and contrast with neighbouring shades, try as we might, B is experienced as lighter than A by every person I've so far met.

The emergence of perspective

The dashboard may evolve slowly, but our explicit awareness of how it functions can come about in sudden shifts. In the Renaissance, artists became aware of how distance is represented by perspective. People further away look smaller:

In contrast to earlier art, in which size would represent the relative importance of the person depicted, not their distance from the observer. Below, the Madonna and child take prominence over the saints and angels attending them.

We continue this exploration of perception and the dashboard next week.

For now, I'll close with a painting from the workshop of Hieronymus Bosch, depicting a Renaissance mountebank fleecing credulous gamblers by taking advantage of our imperfect perceptual apparatus.

Until next time!

Amir

Speakers

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 →